






\^ 












<* 



v»> 



^0* 



'^^ 



r- 















^. *, 










^C? 



r 






6°« 



V.oS- 



v v *" *"'.■% 






cS <* 












<£ 



^"o* : 



o, * 







\> * * * ° /> • "^ 






^0 



^o* 



<Hq* 














c c 






-\^: 




^ ^ O C5, . * ^ *f> 




^\>.# : 



>■ sir 



i$ 



^ 



s-\4 







1 " <) 



^ 



MIND-ENERGY 



M I N D - E N E R G Y 



LECTURES AND ESSAYS 



BY 

HENRI BERGSON 



MEMBER OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY 
PROFESSOR IN THE COLLEGE DB FRANCE 



TRANSLATED BY 

H. WILDON CARR 

Hon. D.Litt. 

PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVBRSITT OF LONDON 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1920 






Copyright, 1920 

BY 

Henry Holt and Company 



£ 



©CI.A597152 



AUG 25 1920 



?y 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

This volume of Lectures and Essays is an English 
edition of L'Energie spirituelle. It is not simply an 
approved and authorized translation, for M. Bergson 
'has gone carefully with me into details of meaning 
and expression in order to give it the same authority 
as the original French. 

The separate articles here collected and selected 
are, partly lectures in exposition of philosophical 
theory, partly detailed psychological investigation and 
metaphysical research. The publication of the vol- 
ume was in preparation when the war broke out and 
interrupted the work. The principle on which the 
articles are selected is indicated in the title, Mind- 
Energy. They are chosen by M. Bergson with 
the view of illustrating his concept that reality is 
fundamentally a spiritual activity. A second series 
is to follow illustrating his theory of philosophic 
method. 

The subject title, Mind-Energy, will recall the 
title, Mind-Stuff, which W. K. Clifford in a lecture 
many years ago employed to denote a new theory of 
consciousness. Since that day a change almost amount- 
ing to a revolution has overtaken the general concept 



vi PREFACE 

of the nature of physical reality. This is due to the 
development of the electro-magnetic theory of matter. 
In modern physics we may say that the old concept of 
stuff has been completely displaced by the new concept 
of radiant energy. An analogous chance has gradu- 
ally meanwhile pervaded the whole science of psy- 
chology. In recent years we have witnessed the open- 
ing up of a new and long-unsuspected realm of fact to 
scientific investigation, the unconscious mind. The 
very term seemed to the older philosophy to imply a 
latent contradiction, today it is a simple general de- 
scription of recognized phenomena. Just as a dyna- 
mic concept of physical reality has replaced the older 
static concept in the mathematical sciences, and as 
this has long found expression in the term energy, so 
a dynamic concept of psychical reality has replaced the 
older concept of mind which identified it with aware- 
ness or consciousness, and the physical analogy suggests 
energy as the most expressive term for it. In affirm- 
ing Mind-Energy the intention is not to include the 
activity of mind in the system of radiant energy which 
constitutes the science of physics. On the contrary, 
what is intended is that the science of mind, quite as 
much as the science of matter, can only be constituted 
by means of a concept which allows of the formulation 
of a law of conservation. Mind is not a phenomenon 
which flares up out of nothing and relapses into noth- 
ing, it can only be understood when it is conceived as 



PREFACE vii 

a continuity of existence, and it can only be conceived 
as a continuity of existence when its actuality is cor- 
related with its virtuality. Or, to express this in terms 
more consonant with the method of philosophy, the 
special phenomena which are manifestations of mind 
can only be systematized as a science of mind when 
they are interpreted as the expression of an activity. 
Activity seeking expression is the concept of Mind- 
Energy. 

But although the term Mind-Energy does not, and 
is not intended to, imply a physical concept of mind, 
yet it is meant to imply, and it does depend upon, a 
metaphysical concept. Mind is not a vis vitae con- 
vertible into a vis inertiae* Equally impossible is it 
to conceive an ultimate dualism, — mind and matter as 
the co-existence of two independent realms of reality. 
Mind and matter are divergent tendencies; they point 
to an original and necessary dichotomy; they are op- 
posite in direction; but they are mutually complement- 
ary and imply the unity of an original impulse. The 
new concept therefore is of a reality with which life 
and consciousness are identical, as distinct from the 
concept of a reality independent of life and condition- 
ing it, and upon which it depends. This new concept 
in its turn suggests a new working principle in the 
biological and psychological sciences. The principle 
is that the great factor in evolution is a kind of un- 
consciousness. Such unconsciousness, however, is not 



via PREFACE 

a primitive self-sufficient principle. It is not an Ab- 
solute, as some metaphysicians have held. It is, on 
the contrary, a restriction of the consciousness which 
life possesses in right, a restriction contrived by life 
in order to fashion the instrumentality of efficient ac- 
tion. So that while the philosophical problem of the 
past has been to define the nature of consciousness, 
explain its genesis, and determine its relation to the 
external reality inferred as conditioning it, the philo- 
sophical problem before us today, if we accept the 
new concept, is to explain the nature and genesis of 
unconsciousness. 

H. W. C. 



Translator's Preface 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 



I Life and Consciousness 3 

The great problems — Philosophical systems — Lings of 
facts — Consciousness, memory, anticipation — What beings 
are conscious ? — The faculty of choosing — Consciousness 
awake and consciousness slumbering — Consciousness and un- 
f oreseeability — The mechanism of free action — The tensions 
of duration — The evolution of life — Man — The creative 
activity — The meaning of joy — The moral life — The so- 
cial life — The beyond. 

II The Soul and the Body 37 

The common-sense theory — The materialist theory — Their 
shortcoming — The metaphysical origin of the hypothesis of 
a parallelism or equivalence between cerebral activity and 
mental activity — The appeal to experience — The probable 
role of the brain — Thought and pantomime — Attention to 
life — Distraction and alienation — Theory suggested by the 
study of memory, especially word-memory — Where are 
memories preserved? — Does the soul survive the body? 

III " Phantasms of the Living " and Psychical Research . . 75 

The prejudice against "psychical research" — Telepathy 
and science — Telepathy and coincidence — Character of 
modern science — Objections against psychical research in 
the name of science — The metaphysics implied in the objec- 
tions — What a direct study of mental activity might yield — 
Consciousness and materiality — Future of psychical research. 

IV Dreams 104 

The part which visual, auditive, tactile, and other sensa- 
tions play in dreams — The part which memory play* — Is 
ix 



x CONTENTS 

PAGE 

the dream creative? — The mechanism of perception in the 
dream state and in the awake state: analogies and differ- 
ences — The psychical character of sleep — Disinterestedness 
and detension — The state of tension. 

V Memory of the Present and False Recognition . . .134 

False recognition described • — Distinguished from : ( 1 ) cer- 
tain pathological states; (2) vague or uncertain recognition 

— Three systems of explanation, according to whether the 
trouble is regarded as affecting thought, feeling or volition — 
The theories criticized — A principle of explanation proposed 
for a wide class of psychical disorders — How memory is 
formed — Memory of the present — The duplication of the 
present in perception and memory — Why this duplication is 
normally unconscious — In what way it may become con- 
scious. — Effect of an "inattention to life" — Insufficiency of 
impetus. 

VI Intellectual Effort 186 

What is the intellectual characteristic of intellectual effort? 

— The different planes of consciousness and the movement of 
the mind in traversing them — Analysis of the effort to re- 
member: instantaneous recall and laborious recall — Analysis 
of the effort of intellection: mechanical interpretation and 
attentive interpretation — Analysis of the effort of invention: 
the scheme, the images and their reciprocal adaptation — Re- 
sults of effort — The metaphysical bearing of the problem. 

VII Brain and Thought: a Philosophical Illusion . . . .231 

The doctrine of an equivalence between the cerebral and 
the mental — Can it be translated either into the language 
of idealism or into that of realism? — The idealist expression 
of the theory avoids contradiction only by an unconscious 
lapse into realism — The realist expression only escapes con- 
tradiction by an unconscious lapse into idealism — The mind 
oscillates continually and unconsciously between idealism and 
realism — The fundamental illusion is continually reinforced 
by complementary and dependent illusions. 

Index v . . 257 



MIND-ENERGY 



LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 

The Huxley Lecture delivered in the University of 
Birmingham, May 24, 1911. 

When a lecture is dedicated to the memory of a 
distinguished man of science, one cannot but feel 
some constraint in the choice of subject. It must 
be a subject that would have specially interested the 
person honoured. I feel no embarrassment on this 
account in regard to the great name of Huxley; the 
difficulty would be to find any problem to which his 
mind would have been indifferent, one of the greatest 
minds the England of the Nineteenth Century pro- 
duced. And yet it seems to me that if one subject 
more than another would have appealed with par- 
ticular force to the mind of a naturalist who was also 
a philosopher, it is the threefold problem of con- 
sciousness, of life and of their relation. For my part, 
I know no problem more fundamental in its import- 
ance, and it is this which I have chosen. 

In dealing with this problem we cannot reckon much 
on the support of systems of philosophy. The prob- 
lems men have most deeply at heart, those which 

3 



4 MIND-ENERGY 

distress the human mind with anxious and passionate 
insistence, are not always the problems which hold 
the place of importance in the speculations of the 
metaphysicians. Whence are we? What are we? 
Whither tend we? These are the vital questions, 
which immediately present themselves when we give 
ourselves up to philosophical reflexion without regard 
to philosophical systems. But, between us and these 
problems, systematic philosophy interposes other 
problems. " Before seeking the solution of a prob- 
lem," it says, " must we not first know how to seek 
it? Study the mechanism of thinking, then discuss 
the nature of knowledge and criticize the faculty of 
criticizing: when you have assured yourself of the 
value of the instrument, you will know how to use 
it." That moment, alas! will never come. I see 
only one means of knowing how far I can go : that is 
by going. If the knowledge we are in search of be 
real instruction, a knowledge which expands thought, 
then to analyse the mechanism of thought before seek- 
ing knowledge could only show the impossibility of 
ever getting it, since we should be studying thought 
before the expansion of it which it is the business of 
knowledge to obtain. A premature reflexion of the 
mind on itself would discourage it from advancing, 
whilst by simply advancing it would have come nearer 
to its goal and perceived, moreover, that the so-called 
obstacles were for the most part the effects of a 



LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 5 

mirage. But suppose even that the metaphysician does 
not thus sacrifice the use of mind for the criticism of 
mind, the end for the means, the prey for the shadow : 
too often, when confronted with the problem of the 
origin, nature and destiny of man, he passes it by in 
order to deal with questions which he judges to be 
higher, and on which he thinks its solution depends. 
He speculates on existence in general, on the real and 
the possible, on time and space, on mind and matter, 
and from these generalities descends gradually to the 
consciousness and life whose essence he would under- 
stand. Now, is it not clear that his speculations have 
become purely abstract, with no bearing on the things 
themselves, but only on the altogether too simple idea 
of them which he has formed before he has studied 
them empirically? It would be impossible to explain 
a philosopher's attachment to so strange a method had 
it not the threefold advantage that it flatters his self- 
esteem, facilitates his work and gives him the illusion 
of definitive knowledge. As it leads him to some very 
general theory, to an almost empty concept, he can 
always, later on, place retrospectively in the concept 
whatever experience has come to teach him of the 
thing. He will then claim to have anticipated experi- 
ence by the force of reasoning alone, to have embraced 
beforehand in a wider conception those conceptions, 
narrower, I confess, but the only ones difficult to form 
and the only ones useful to keep, which we get by the 



6 MIND-ENERGY 

study of facts. On the other hand, as nothing is easier 
than to reason geometrically with abstract ideas, he 
has no trouble in constructing an iron-bound system, 
which appears to be strong because it is unbending. 
But this apparent strength is simply due to the fact 
that the idea with which he works is diagrammatic 
and rigid and does not follow the sinuous and mobile 
contours of reality. How much better a more modest 
philosophy would be, one which would go straight 
to its object without worrying about the principles on 
which it depends! It would not aim at immediate 
certainty, which can only be ephemeral. It would take 
its time. It would be a gradual ascent to the light. 
Borne along in an experience growing ever wider and 
wider, rising to ever higher and higher probabilities, 
it would strive towards final certainty as to a limit. 

I hold, for my part, that there is no principle from 
which the solution of the great problems can be 
mathematically deduced. Moreover, I am unable to 
discover any decisive fact which clinches the matter, 
such as we expect to find in physics and chemistry. 
But it seems to me that in different regions of experi- 
ence there are different groups of facts, each of which, 
without giving us the desired knowledge, points out 
to us the direction in which we may find it. Now, to 
have only a direction is something. And it is still 
more to have several, for these directions will naturally 
converge towards one and the same point, and it is 



LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 7 

that point we are seeking. In short, we possess even 
now a certain number of lines of facts, which do not 
go as far as we want, but which we can prolong 
hypothetically. I wish to follow out some of these 
with you. Each, taken apart, will lead us only to a 
conclusion which is simply probable; but taking them 
all together, they will, by their convergence, bring 
before us such an accumulation of probabilities that 
we shall feel on the road to certitude. Moreover, 
we shall come nearer and nearer to it through the joint 
effort of philosophers who will become partners. For, 
in this view, philosophy is no longer a construction, 
the systematic work of a single thinker. It needs, and 
unceasingly calls for, corrections and re-touches. It 
progresses like positive science. Like it, too, it is a 
work of collaboration. 

The first line or direction which I invite you to 
follow is this. When we speak of mind we mean, 
above everything else, consciousness. What is con- 
sciousness? There is no need to define so familiar a 
thing, something which is continually present in every 
one's experience. I will not give a definition, for that 
would be less clear than the thing itself; I will char- 
acterize consciousness by its most obvious feature: it 
means, before everything else, memory. Memory 
may lack amplitude ; it may embrace but a feeble part 
of the past; it may retain only what is just happen- 



8 MIND-ENERGY 

ing; but memory is there, or there is no consciousness. 
A consciousness unable to conserve its past, forgetting 
itself unceasingly, would be a consciousness perishing 
and having to be reborn at each moment : and what is 
this but unconsciousness? When Leibniz said of mat- 
ter that it is " a momentary mind," did he not declare 
it, whether he would or no, insensible? All conscious^ 
ness, then, is memory, — conservation and accumula- 
tion of the past in the present. 

But all consciousness is also anticipation of the 
future. Consider the direction of your mind at any 
moment you like to choose ; you will find that it is 
occupied with what now is, but always and especially 
with regard to what is about to be. Attention is ex- 
pectation, and there is no consciousness without a cer- 
tain attention to life. The future is there; it calls 
up, or rather, it draws us to it; its uninterrupted trac- 
tion makes us advance along the route of time and 
requires us also to be continually acting. All action is 
an encroachment on the future. 

To retain what no longer is, to anticipate what as 
yet is not, — these are the primary functions of con- 
sciousness. For consciousness there is no present, if 
the present be a mathematical instant. An instant is 
the purely theoretical limit which separates the past 
from the future. It may, in the strict sense, be con- 
ceived} it is never perceived. When we think we have 
seized hold of it, it is already far away. What we 



LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 9 

actually perceive is a certain span of duration com- 
posed of two parts — our immediate past and our im- 
minent future. We lean on the past, we bend for- 
ward on the future: leaning and bending forward is 
the characteristic attitude of a conscious being. Con- 
sciousness is then, as it were, the hyphen which joins 
what has been to what will be, the bridge which spans 
the past and the future. But what purpose does the 
bridge serve ? What is consciousness called on to do ? 
In order to reply to the question, let us inquire 
what beings are conscious and how far in nature the 
domain of consciousness extends. But let us not insist 
that the evidence shall be complete, precise and math- 
ematical; if we do, we shall get nothing. To know 
with scientific certainty that a particular being is con- 
scious, we should have to enter into it, coincide with 
it, be it. It is literally impossible for you to prove, 
either by experience or by reasoning, that I, who am 
speaking to you at this moment, am a conscious being. 
I may be an ingeniously constructed natural auto- 
maton, going, coming, discoursing; the very words I 
am speaking to affirm that I am conscious may be be- 
ing pronounced unconsciously. Yet you will agree 
that though it is not impossible that I am an uncon- 
scious automaton, it is very improbable. Between us 
there is an evident external resemblance; and from 
that external resemblance you conclude by analogy 
there is an internal likeness. Reasoning by analogy 



io MIND-ENERGY 

never gives more than a probability; yet there are 
numerous cases in which that probability is so high that 
it amounts to practical certainty. Let us then follow 
the thread of the analogy and inquire how far con- 
sciousness extends, and where it stops. 

It is sometimes said that, in ourselves, conscious- 
ness is directly connected with a brain, and that we 
must therefore attribute consciousness to living beings 
which have a brain and deny it to those which have 
none. But it is easy to see the fallacy of such an 
argument. It would be just as though we should 
say that because in ourselves digestion is directly con- 
nected with a stomach, therefore only living beings 
with a stomach can digest. We should be entirely 
wrong, for it is not necessary to have a stomach, nor 
even to have special organs, in order to digest. An 
amoeba digests, although it is an almost undifferen- 
tiated protoplasmic mass. What is true is that in 
proportion to the complexity and perfection of an 
organism there is a division of labour; special organs 
are assigned special functions; and the faculty of 
digesting is localized in the stomach, or rather in a 
general digestive apparatus, which works better be- 
cause confined to that one function alone. In like 
manner, consciousness in man is unquestionably con- 
nected with the brain : but it by no means follows that 
a brain is indispensable to consciousness. The lower 
we go in the animal series, the more the nervous centres 



LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS n 

are simplified and separate from one another, and at 
last they disappear altogether, merged in the general 
mass of an organism with hardly any differentiation. 
If then, at the top of the scale of living beings, con- 
sciousness is attached to very complicated nervous cen- 
tres, must we not suppose that it accompanies the 
nervous system down its whole descent, and that when 
at last the nerve stuff is merged in the yet undiffer- 
entiated living matter, consciousness is still there, dif- 
fused, confused, but not reduced to nothing? Theo- 
retically, then, everything living might be conscious. 
In principle, consciousness is co-extensive with life. 
Now, is it so in fact? Does not consciousness, oc- 
casionally, fall asleep or slumber? This is probable, 
and here is a second line of facts which leads to this 
conclusion. 

In the living being which we know best, it is by 
means of the brain that consciousness works. Let 
us then cast a glance at the human brain and see how 
it functions. The brain is part of a nervous system 
which includes, together with the brain proper, the 
spinal cord, the nerves, etc. In the spinal cord there 
are mechanisms set up, each of which contains, ready 
to start, a definite complicated action which the body 
can carry out at will, just as the rolls of perforated 
paper which are used in the pianola mark out before- 
hand the tunes which the instrument will play. Each 
of these mechanisms can be set working directly by 



12. MIND-ENERGY 

an external cause : the body, then, at once responds to 
the stimulus received by executing a number of in- 
terco-ordinated movements. But in some cases the 
stimulus, instead of obtaining immediately a more or 
less complicated reaction from the body by addressing 
itself directly to the spinal cord, mounts first to the 
brain, then redescends and calls the mechanism of 
the spinal cord into play after having made the brain 
intervene. Why is this indirect path taken? What 
purpose is served by the intervention of the brain? 
We may easily guess, if we consider the general struc- 
ture of the nervous system. The brain is in a general 
relation to all the mechanisms in the spinal cord and 
not only to some particular one among them; also it 
receives every kind of stimulus, not only certain special 
kinds. It is therefore a crossway, where the nervous 
impulse arriving by any sensory path can be directed 
into any motor path. Or, if you prefer, it is a com- 
mutator, which allows the current received from one 
point of the organism to be switched in the direction 
of any motor contrivance. When the stimulus, then, 
instead of following the direct path, goes off to the 
brain, it is evidently in order that it may set in action a 
motor mechanism which has been chosen, instead of 
one which is automatic. The spinal cord contains a 
great number of ready-formed responses to the ques- 
tion which the circumstances address to it ; the interven- 
tion of the brain secures that the most appropriate 



LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 13 

among them shall be given. The brain is an organ of 
choice. 

Now, the further we descend the scale of the animal 
series, the less and less definite we find the separation 
becoming between the functions of the spinal cord and 
those of the brain. The faculty of choosing, at first 
localized in the brain, extends gradually to the spinal 
cord, which then, probably, constructs somewhat fewer 
mechanisms and also mounts them with less precision. 
At last, when we come to the nervous system which is 
rudimentary, still more when distinct nervous elements 
have disappeared altogether, automatism and choice 
are fused into one. The reaction is now so simple 
that it appears almost mechanical; it still hesitates 
and gropes, however, as though it would be voluntary. 
The amoeba, for instance, when in presence of a sub- 
stance which can be made food, pushes out towards 
it filaments able to seize and enfold foreign bodies. 
These pseudopodia are real organs and therefore 
mechanisms; but they are only temporary organs 
created for the particular purpose, and it seems they 
still show the rudiments of choice. From top to bot- 
tom, therefore, of the scale of animal life we see being 
exercised, though the form is ever vaguer as we de- 
scend, the faculty of choice, that is, the responding to 
a definite stimulus by movements more or less unfore- 
seen. This then is what we find along the second line 
of facts. It re-enforces the conclusion we had come 



i 4 MIND-ENERGY 

to before ; for if, as we said, consciousness retains the 
past and anticipates the future, it is probably because 
it is called on to make a choice. In order to choose, 
we must know what we can do and remember the con- 
sequences, advantageous or injurious, of what we have 
already done ; we must foresee and we must remember. 
And now we are going to see that our first conclusion, 
re-enforced by this new line of facts, supplies an in- 
telligible answer to the question before us : are all liv- 
ing beings conscious, or does consciousness cover a part 
only of the domain of life? 

If consciousness mean choice and if its role be to 
decide, it is unlikely that we shall meet it in organisms 
which do not move spontaneously, and which have no 
decision to take. Strictly speaking, there is no living 
being which appears completely incapable of spon- 
taneous movement. Even in the vegetable world, 
where the organism is generally fixed to the soil, the 
faculty of movement is dormant rather than absent; 
it awakens when it can be of use. I believe all living 
beings, plants and animals, possess it in right; but 
many of them have renounced it in fact, — some ani- 
mals, especially those which have become parasitic on 
other organisms and have no need of moving about 
to find their nourishment, and the vast majority of 
plants: has it not been said that plants are earth- 
parasites? It appears to me therefore extremely likely 
that consciousness, originally immanent in all that lives, 



LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 15 

is dormant where there is no longer spontaneous move- 
ment, and awakens when life tends to free activity. 
We can verify the law in ourselves. What happens 
when one of our actions ceases to be spontaneous and 
becomes automatic? Consciousness departs from it. 
In learning an exercise, for example, we begin by being 
conscious of each of the movements we execute. 
Why? Because we originate the action, because it is 
the result of a decision and implies a choice. Then, 
gradually, as the movements become more and more 
linked together and more and more determine one 
another mechanically, dispensing us from the need of 
choosing and deciding, the consciousness of them 
diminishes and disappears. On the other hand, when 
is it that our consciousness attains its greatest liveli- 
ness? Is it not at those moments of inward crisis 
when we hesitate between two, or it may be several, 
different courses to take, when we feel that our future 
will be what we make it? The variations in the in- 
tensity of our consciousness seem then to correspond 
to the more or less considerable sum of choice or, as 
I would say, to the amount of creation, which our 
conduct requires. Everything leads us to believe that 
it is thus with consciousness in general. If conscious- 
ness means memory and anticipation, it is because con- 
sciousness is synonymous with choice. 

Let us then imagine living matter in its elementary 
form, such as it may have been when it first appeared: 



1 6 MIND-ENERGY 

a simple mass of protoplasmic jelly like the amoeba, 
which can undergo change of form at will, and 
is therefore vaguely conscious. Now, for it to grow 
and evolve, there are two ways open. It may take 
the path towards movement and action, — movement 
growing ever more effective, action growing freer and 
freer. The path towards movement involves risk and 
adventure, but also it involves consciousness, with its 
growing degrees of intensity and depth. It may take 
the other path, it may abandon the faculty of acting 
and choosing, the potentiality of which it carries within 
it, may accommodate itself to obtain from the spot 
where it is all it requires for its support, instead of 
going abroad to seek it. Existence is then assured to 
it, a tranquil, unenterprising existence, but this ex- 
istence is also torpor, the first effect of immobility: the 
torpor soon becomes fixed; this is unconsciousness. 
These are the two paths which He open before the evo- 
lution of life. Living matter finds itself committed 
partly to the one path, partly to the other. Speaking 
generally, the first path may be said to mark the direc- 
tion of the animal world (we have to qualify it, because 
many animal species renounce movement and with it 
probably consciousness also) ; the second may be said 
to mark the direction of the vegetable world (again it 
has to be qualified, for mobility, and therefore prob- 
ably consciousness also, may occasionally be awakened 
in plants). 



LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 17 

When, now, we reflect on this bias or tendency 
of life at its entry into the world, we see it bringing 
something which encroaches on inert matter. The 
world left to itself obeys fatalistic laws. In deter- 
minate conditions matter behaves in a determinate way. 
Nothing it does is unforeseeable. Were our science 
complete and our calculating power infinite, we should 
be able to predict everything which will come to pass 
in the inorganic material universe, in its mass and in its 
elements, as we predict an eclipse of the sun or moon. 
Matter is inertia, geometry, necessity. But with life 
there appears free, predictable, movement. The liv- 
ing being chooses or tends to choose. Its role is to 
create. In a world where everything else is deter- 
mined, a zone of indetermination surrounds it. To 
create the future requires preparatory action in the 
present, to prepare what will be is to utilize what has 
been: life therefore is employed from its start in con- 
serving the past and anticipating the future in a dura- 
tion in which past, present and future tread one on 
another, forming an indivisible continuity. Such mem- 
ory, such anticipation, are consciousness itself. This 
is why, in right if not in fact, consciousness is co-ex- 
tensive with life. 

Consciousness and matter appear to us, then, as 
radically different forms of existence, even as antagon- 
istic forms,twhich have to find a modus Vivendi. Mat- 
ter is necessity, consciousness is freedom; but though 



1 8 MIND-ENERGY 

diametrically opposed to one another^ life has found 
the way of reconciling them. This is precisely what 
life is, — freedom inserting itself within necessity, turn- 
ing it to its profit. Life would be an impossibility 
were the determinism of matter so absolute as to admit 
no relaxation. Suppose, however, that at particular 
moments and at particular points matter shows a cer- 
tain elasticity, then and there will be the opportunity 
for consciousness to instal itself. It will have to 
humble itself at first; yet, once installed, it will dilate, 
it will spread from its point of entry and not rest till it 
has conquered the whole, for time is at its disposal, and 
the slightest quantity of indetermination, by continu- 
ally adding to itself, will make up as much freedom 
as you like. But here are new lines of facts which 
point to the same conclusion with still greater pre- 
cision. 

When we investigate the way in which a living body 
goes to work to execute movements, we find that the 
method it employs is always the same. This consists 
in utilizing certain unstable substances which, like 
gunpowder, need only a spark to explode them. I 
refer to foodstuffs, especially the ternary substances, 
— the carbo-hydrates and fats. A considerable sum 
of potential energy, accumulated in them, is ready 
to be converted into movement. That energy has 
been slowly and gradually borrowed from the sun 
by plants; and the animal which feeds on a plant, 



LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 19 

or on an animal which has been fed on a plant, or 
on an animal which has fed on an animal which has 
been fed on a plant, and so on, simply receives into 
its body an explosive which life has fabricated by stor- 
ing solar energy. To execute a movement, the im- 
prisoned energy is liberated. All that is required is, 
as it were, to press a button, touch a hair-trigger, apply 
a spark: the explosion occurs, and the movement in 
the chosen direction is accomplished. The first living 
beings appear to have hesitated between the vegetable 
and animal life: this means that life, at the outset, 
undertook to perform the twofold duty, both to fabri- 
cate the explosive and to utilize it in movements. As 
vegetables and animals became differentiated, life split 
off into two kingdoms, thus separating from one an- 
other the two functions primitively united. The one 
became more preoccupied with the fabrication of ex- 
plosives, the other with their explosion. But life as a 
whole, whether we envisage it at the start or at the 
end of its evolution, is a double labour of slow accumu- 
lation and sudden discharge. Its task is to ensure that 
matter, by a slow and difficult process, shall store 
potential energy and hold it available at need as kinetic 
energy. Now, what could a free cause do, — a cause 
which although unable to break the necessity to which 
matter is subject would yet be able to bend it, — a 
cause which although able to exercise but a very small 
influence on matter yet should purpose to obtain move- 



20 MIND-ENERGY 

ments ever more powerful in a direction ever more 
freely chosen? Would it not behave exactly in this 
way? It would strive to have nothing more to do, in 
order to release an energy which it had caused matter 
slowly to accumulate, than touch a spring or apply a 
spark. 

We shall come to the same conclusion along a third 
line of facts. Let us consider the idea which precedes 
an action in conscious beings, apart from the action 
itself. What is the sign by which we recognize the 
man of action, the man who leaves his mark on the 
events in which chance has called on him to take part? 
Is it not the momentary vision which embraces a whole 
course of events within one purview? The greater his 
hold on the past in his present vision, the heavier is 
the mass he is pushing against the eventualities prepar- 
ing. His action, like an arrow, flies forward with the 
greater force the more tensely in memory his idea had 
been strung. Now think of our visual consciousness 
in relation to the perceptual matter it apprehends. In 
its briefest moment consciousness embraces thousands 
of millions of vibrations which for inert matter are 
successive ; if matter were endowed with memory, the 
first of these would appear to the last in the infinitely 
remote past. When I open and close my eyes in rapid 
succession, I experience a succession of visual sensa- 
tions each of which is the condensation of an extra- 
ordinarily long history unrolled in the external world. 



LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 21 

There are then, succeeding one another, billions of 
vibrations, that is a series of events which, even with 
the greatest possible economy of time, would take me 
thousands of years to count. Yet these dull and mo- 
notonous events, which would fill thirty centuries of 
a matter become self-conscious, occupy only a second 
of my own consciousness, able to contract them into one 
picturesque sensation of light. Moreover, just the 
same could be said of all the other sensations. Placed 
at the confluence of consciousness and matter, sensa- 
tion condenses, into the duration which belongs to us 
and characterizes our consciousnes, immense periods 
of what we can call by analogy the duration of things. 
Must we not think, then, that if our perception con- 
tracts material events in this way it is in order that 
our action may dominate them? Supposing the nec- 
essity inherent in matter be such that at each of its 
moments it can be forced, but only within extremely 
restricted limits, how in such case must a consciousness 
proceed if it would insert a free action into this ma- 
terial world, let that action be no more than releasing 
a spring or directing a movement ? Would it not have 
to adopt precisely this method? Should we not ex- 
pect to find between its duration and the duration of 
things a difference of tension such that innumerable 
instants of the material world could be held within one 
single instant of the conscious life, so that the desired 
action, accomplished by consciousness in one of its 



22 MIND-ENERGY 

moments, could be distributed over an enormous num- 
ber of the moments of matter and so sum up within it 
the indeterminations almost infinitesimal which each of 
them admits? In other words, is not the tension of 
the duration of a conscious being the measure of its 
power of acting, of the quantity of free creative ac- 
tivity it can introduce into the world? I hold that 
it is, but for the moment I will not press this. All I 
wish to say is that this new line of facts leads us to 
the same conclusion as the former line. Whether 
we consider the act which consciousness decrees or the 
perception which prepares that act, in either case con- 
sciousness appears as a force seeking to insert itself 
in matter in order to get possession of it and turn it to 
its profit. It works in two complementary ways: — 
in one, by an explosive action, it liberates instantly, in 
the chosen direction, energy which matter has been 
accumulating during a long time; in the other, by a 
work of contraction, it gathers into a single instant 
the incalculable number of small events which matter 
holds distinct, as when we sum up in a word the im- 
mensity of a history. 

Let us then place ourselves at the converging point 
of these different lines of facts. On the one hand, 
there is matter, subject to necessity, devoid of memory, 
or at least with no more than suffices to form the bridge 
between two of its moments, each of which can be 



LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 23 

deduced from its antecedent, each of which adds noth- 
ing to what the world already contains. On the other 
hand, there is consciousness, memory with freedom, 
continuity of creation in a duration in which there is 
real growth ; — a duration which is drawn out, wherein 
the past is preserved indivisible; a duration which 
grows like a plant, but like the plant of a fairy tale 
transforms its leaves and flowers from moment to 
moment. We may surmise that these two realities, 
matter and consciousness, are derived from a common 
source. If, as I have tried to show in a previous work 
(Creative Evolution), matter is the inverse of con- 
sciousness, if consciousness is action unceasingly creat- 
ing and enriching itself, whilst matter is action con- 
tinually unmaking itself or using itself up, then neither 
matter nor consciousness can be explained apart from 
one another. I will not return to this theme now, I 
will merely say that I see in the whole evolution of life 
on our planet a crossing of matter by a creative con- 
sciousness, and effort to set free, by force of ingenuity 
and invention, something which in the animal still re- 
mains imprisoned and is only finally released when we 
reach man. 

We need not go into the details of the scientific 
investigations which since Lamarck and Darwin have 
come more and more to confirm the idea of an evolu- 
tion of species, that is, of the generation of species 
from one another, the organized forms from the 



24 MIND-ENERGY 

simpler. We can hardly refuse to accept a hypothesis 
which has the threefold support of comparative ana- 
tomy, of embryology and of paleontology. Science 
has shown, moreover, along the whole evolution of 
life, the various consequences attending upon the fact 
that living beings must be adapted to the conditions 
of the environment. Yet this necessity would seem 
to explain the arrest of life in various definite forms, 
rather than the movement which carries the organiza- 
tion ever higher. A very inferior organism is as well 
adapted as ours to the conditions of existence, judged 
by its success in maintaining its life: why, then, does 
life which has succeeded in adapting itself go on com- 
plicating itself, and complicating itself more and more 
dangerously? Some living forms to be met with to- 
day have come down unchanged from remotest pal- 
aeozoic times; they have persisted, unchanged, 
throughout the ages. Life then might have stopped 
at some one definite form. Why did it not stop wher- 
ever it was possible? Why has it gone on? Why, — 
unless it be that there is an impulse driving it to take 
ever greater and greater risks towards its goal of an 
ever higher and higher efficiency? 

Even a cursory survey of the evolution of life gives 
us the feeling that this impulse is a reality. Yet we 
must not think that it has driven living matter in one 
single direction, nor that the different species repre- 
sent so many stages along a single route, nor that 



LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 25 

the course has been accomplished without obstacle. It 
is clear that the effort has met with resistance in the 
matter which it has had to make use of; it has needed 
to split itself up, to distribute along different lines of 
evolution the tendencies it bore within it; it has turned 
aside, it has retrograded; at times it has stopped 
short. On two lines only has it achieved an undeniable 
success, partial in the one case, relatively complete in 
the other. These are the lines of evolution of the 
arthropods and the vertebrates. At the end of the 
first line, we find the instincts of the insect; at the 
end of the second, human intelligence. We have good 
ground, then, for believing that the evolving force 
bore within it originally, but confused together or 
rather the one implied in the other, instinct and intel- 
ligence. 

Things have happened just as though an immense 
current of consciousness, interpenetrated with poten- 
tialities of every kind, had traversed matter to draw it 
towards organization and make it, notwithstanding 
that it is necessity itself, an instrument of freedom. 
But consciousness has had a narrow escape from being 
itself ensnared. Matter, enfolding it, bends it to its 
own automatism, lulls it to sleep in its own unconscious- 
ness. On certain lines of evolution, those of the vege- 
table world in particular, automatism and unconscious- 
ness are the rule: the freedom immanent in evolution 
is shown even here, no doubt, in the creation of un- 



26 MIND-ENERGY 

foreseen f orms which are veritably works of art ; but, 
once created, the individual has no choice. On other 
lines, consciousness succeeds in freeing itself sufficiently 
for the individual to acquire feeling, and therewith a 
certain latitude of choice; but the necessities of ex- 
istence restrict the power of choosing to a simple aid 
of the need to live. So, from the lowest to the high- 
est rung of the ladder of life, freedom is riveted in a 
chain which at most it succeeds in stretching. With 
man alone a sudden bound is made ; the chain is broken. 
The human brain closely resembles the animal brain, 
but it has, over and above, a special factor which fur- 
nishes the means of opposing to every contracted habit 
another habit, and to every automatism an antagonistic 
automatism. Freedom, coming to itself whilst neces- 
sity is at grips with itself, brings back matter to the 
condition of being a mere instrument. It is as though 
it had divided in order to rule. 

That the united efforts of physics and chemistry to 
manufacture matter resembling living matter may one 
day be successful is by no means improbable, for life 
proceeds by insinuating, and the force which drew 
matter away from pure mechanism could not have 
taken hold of matter had it not first itself adopted that 
mechanism. In such wise, the points of the railway 
coincide at first with the lines from which they will 
shunt the train. In other words, life must have in- 
stalled itself in a matter which had already acquired 



LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 27 

some of the characters of life without the work of life. 
But matter left to itself would have stopped there; 
and the work of our laboratories will probably go 
no further. We shall reproduce, that is to say, 
some characters of living matter; we shall not obtain 
the push in virtue of which it reproduces itself and, in 
the meaning of transformism, evolves. Now, repro- 
duction and evolution are life itself. Both are the man- 
ifestation of an inward impulse, of the twofold need 
of increasing in number and wealth by multiplication 
in space and complication in time, of two instincts which 
make their appearance with life and later become the 
two great motives in human activity, love and ambi- 
tion. Visibly there is a force working, seeking to free 
itself from trammels and also to surpass itself, to give 
first all it has and then something more than it has. 
What else is mind? How can we distinguish the 
force of mind, if it exist, from other forces save in 
this, that it has the faculty of drawing from itself 
more than it contains ? Yet we must take into account 
the obstacles of every kind that such a force will meet 
on its way. The evolution of life, from its early 
origins up to man, presents to us the image of a cur* 
rent of consciousness flowing against matter, deter- 
mined to force for itself a subterranean passage, mak- 
ing tentative attempts to the right and to the left, 
pushing more or less ahead, for the most part en- 
countering rock and breaking itself against it, and yet, 



28 MIND-ENERGY 

in one direction at least, succeeding in piercing its way- 
through and emerging into the light. That direction 
is the line of evolution which ends in man. 

Now why did mind engage in such an enterprise? 
What interest could it have had in boring the tunnel? 
To answer this inquiry, we should have again to follow 
several new lines of facts and see them converge on 
one single point. But this would require us to go 
into details concerning psychical life, concerning the 
psycho-physiological relation, concerning the moral 
ideal and social progress. Let us rather go at once 
to the conclusion. Here are matter and consciousness 
confronting one another. Matter is primarily what 
brings division and precision. A thought, taken by 
itself, is a reciprocal implication of elements of 
which we cannot say that they are one or many. 
Thought is a continuity, and in all continuity there 
is confusion. For a thought to become distinct, there 
must be dispersion in words. Our only way of taking 
count of what we have in mind is to set down on a 
sheet of paper, side by side, terms which in our think- 
ing interpenetrate. Just in this way does matter dis- 
tinguish, separate, resolve into individualities, and 
finally into personalities, tendencies before confused 
in the original impulse of life. On the other hand, 
matter calls forth effort and makes it possible. 
Thought which is only thought, the work of art which 
is only conceived, the poem which is no more than a 



LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 29 

dream, as yet cost nothing in toil; it is the material 
realization of the poem in words, of the artistic con- 
ception in statue or picture, which demands effort. 
The effort is toilsome, but also it is precious, more 
precious even than the work which it produces, be- 
cause, thanks to it, one has drawn out from the self 
more than it had already, we are raised above our- 
selves. This effort was impossible without matter. 
By the resistance matter offers and by the docility with 
which we endow it, is at one and the same time ob- 
stacle, instrument and stimulus. It experiences our 
force, keeps the imprint of it, calls for its intensifica- 
tion. 

Philosophers who have speculated on the meaning 
of life and on the destiny of man have failed to take 
sufficient notice of an indication which nature itself 
has given us. Nature warns us by a clear sign that 
our destination is attained. That sign is joy. I mean 
joy, not pleasure. Pleasure is only a contrivance 
devised by nature to obtain for the creature the pre- 
servation of its life, it does not indicate the direction 
in which life is thrusting. But joy always announces 
that life has succeeded, gained ground, conquered. 
All great joy has a triumphant note. Now, if we take 
this indication into account and follow this new line of 
facts, we find that wherever there is joy, there is 
creation; the richer the creation, the deeper the joy. 
The mother beholding her child is joyous, because she 



30 MIND-ENERGY 

is conscious of having created it, physically and 
morally. The merchant developing his business, the 
manufacturer seeing his industry prosper, are joyous, 
— is it because money is gained and notoriety acquired ? 
No doubt, riches and social position count for much, 
but it is pleasures rather than joy that they bring; true 
joy, here, is the feeling of having started an enterprise 
which goes, of having brought something to life. 
Take exceptional joys, — the joy of the artist who has 
realized his thought, the joy of the thinker who has 
made a discovery or invention. You may hear it said 
that these men work for glory and get their highest joy 
from the admiration they win. Profound error ! We 
cling to praise and honours in the exact degree in which 
we are not sure of having succeeded. There is a 
touch of modesty in vanity. It is to reassure ourselves 
that we seek approbation; and just as we wrap the 
prematurely born child in cotton wool, so we gather 
round our work the warm admiration of mankind in 
case there should be insufficient vitality. But he who 
is sure, absolutely sure, of having produced a work 
which will endure and live, cares no more for praise and 
feels above glory, because he is a creator, because he 
knows it, because the joy he feels is the joy of a god. 
If, then, in every domain the triumph of life is crea- 
tion, must we not suppose that human life has its goal 
in a creation which, unlike that of the artist and philo- 
sopher, can be pursued always by all men — creation 



LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 31 

of self by self, the growing of the personality by an 
effort which draws much from little, something from 
nothing, and adds unceasingly to whatever wealth the 
world contains ? 

Regarded from without, nature appears an immense 
inflorescence of unforeseeable novelty. The force 
which animates it seems to create lovingly, for noth- 
ing, for the mere pleasure of it, the endless variety of 
vegetable and animal species. On each it confers the 
absolute value of a great work of art. It seems as 
much attached to the first comer as to man himself. 
But the form of a living being, once designed, is thence- 
forward indefinitely repeated, and the acts of this liv- 
ing being, once performed, tend to imitate themselves 
and recommence automatically. Automatism and 
repetition, which prevail everywhere except in man, 
should warn us that living forms are only halts: this 
work of marking time is not the forward movement 
of life. The artist's standpoint is therefore important, 
but not final. Richness and originality of forms do 
indeed indicate an expansion of life, but in this ex- 
pansion, where beauty means power, life also shows a 
stop of its impulse, a momentary powerlessness to push 
farther, like the boy who rounds off in a graceful curve 
the end of the slide. 

The standpoint of the moralist is higher. In man 
alone, especially among the best of mankind, the vital 
movement pursues its way without hindrance, thrust- 



32 MIND-ENERGY 

ing through that work of art, the human body, which 
it has created on its way, the creative current of the 
moral life. Man, called on at every moment to lean 
on the totality of his past in order to bring his weight 
to bear more effectively on the future, is the great suc- 
cess of life. But it is the moral man who is a creator 
in the highest degree, — the man whose action, itself 
intense, is also capable of intensifying the action of 
other men, and, itself generous, can kindle fires on the 
hearths of generosity. The men of moral grandeur, 
particularly those whose inventive and simple heroism 
has opened new paths to virtue, are revealers of meta- 
physical truth. Although they are the culminating 
point of evolution, yet they are nearest the source and 
they enable us to perceive the impulsion which comes 
from the deep. It is in studying these great lives, in 
striving to experience sympathetically what they ex- 
perience, that we may penetrate by an act of intuition 
to the life principle itself. To pierce the mystery 
of the deep, it is sometimes necessary to regard the 
heights. It is earth's hidden fire which appears at 
the summit of the volcano. 

On the two great routes that the vital impulse has 
found open before it, along the series of the arthropods 
and the series of the vertebrates, instinct and intelli- 
gence, at first wrapped up confusedly within one an- 
other, have in their development taken divergent di- 
rections. At the culminating point of the first evolu- 



LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 33 

tion are the hymenoptera, at the culminating point of 
the second, man. In each, in spite of the radical differ- 
ence in the forms attained and the growing separation 
of the paths followed, it is to social life that evolution 
leads, as though the need of it was felt from the 
beginning, or rather as though there were some original 
and essential aspiration of life which could find full 
satisfaction only in society. Society, which is the 
community of individual energies, benefits from the 
efforts of all its members and renders effort easier to 
all. It can only subsist by subordinating the indivi- 
dual, it can only progress by leaving the individual 
free: contradictory requirements, which have to be 
reconciled. With insects, the first condition alone is 
fulfilled. The societies of ants and bees are admir- 
ably disciplined and united, but fixed in an invariable 
routine. If the individual is forgotten in the society, 
the society on its part also has forgotten its desti- 
nation. Individual and society, both in a state of 
somnambulism, go round and round in the same 
circle, instead of moving straight forward to a greater 
social efficiency and a completer individual freedom. 
Human societies, alone, have kept full in view both 
the ends to be attained. Struggling among them- 
selves and at war with one another, they are seeking 
clearly, by friction and shock, to round off the angles, 
to wear out antagonisms, to eliminate contradictions, 
to bring about that individual wills should insert them- 



34 MIND-ENERGY 

selves in the social will without losing their individual 
form, and that different and diverse societies should 
enter in their turn into a wider and more inclusive 
society and yet not lose their originality or their in- 
dependence. The spectacle is both disquieting and re- 
assuring, for we cannot contemplate it without saying 
that, here too, across innumerable obstacles, life is 
working both by individualization and integration to 
obtain the greatest quantity, the richest variety, the 
highest qualities, of invention and effort. 

To conclude, then, the aspirations of our moral na- 
ture are not in the least contradicted by positive 
science. On this, as on many other points, I quite 
agree with the opinion expressed by Sir Oliver Lodge 
in many of his works, and especially in his admirable 
book on Life and Matter. How could there be dis- 
harmony between our intuitions and our science, how 
especially could our science make us renounce our in- 
tuitions, if these intuitions are something like instinct, 
— an instinct conscious, refined, spiritualized, — and 
if instinct is still nearer life than intellect and science? 
Intuition and intellect do not oppose each other, save 
where intuition refuses to become more precise by 
coming into touch with facts scientifically studied, and 
where intellect, instead of confining itself to science 
proper (that is, to what can be inferred from facts or 
proved by reasoning), combines with this an uncon- 



LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 35 

scious and inconsistent metaphysic which in vain lays 
claim to scientific pretensions. 

If we now take into account that the mental activity 
of man overflows his cerebral activity, that his brain 
is a storehouse of motor habits but not of memories, 
that the other functions of thought are even more inde- 
pendent of the brain than memory is, that preservation 
and even intensification of personality are not only 
possible but even probable after the disintegration of 
the body, shall we not suspect that, in its passage 
through the matter which it finds here, consciousness is 
tempering itself like steel and preparing itself for a 
more efficient action, for an intenser life ? That life, 
as I imagine it, is still a life of striving, a need of in- 
vention, a creative evolution: to it each of us might 
come by the play of natural forces alone, taking our 
place on the moral plane to which in this life the 
quality and quantity of our effort had already virtually 
raised us, as the balloon set free takes the position in 
the air which its density assigns it. I admit that this 
is no more than a hypothesis. We were just now in 
the region of the probable, this is the region of the 
simply possible. Let us confess our ignorance, but 
let us not resign ourselves to the belief that we can 
never know. If there be a beyond for conscious be- 
ings, I cannot see why we should not be able to dis- 
cover the means to explore it. Nothing which con- 



36 MIND-ENERGY 

cerns man is likely to conceal itself deliberately from 
the eyes of man. Sometimes, moreover, the informa- 
tion we imagine to be far off, even infinitely distant, is 
at our side, waiting only till it pleases us to notice it. 
Recollect what has happened in regard to another be- 
yond, that of ultra-planetary space. Auguste Comte 
declared the chemical composition of the heavenly 
bodies to be for ever unknowable by us. A few years 
later the spectroscope was invented, and today wc 
know, better than if we had gone there, what the stars 
are made of. 



II 

THE SOUL AND THE BODY 
A Lecture delivered in Paris, at Foi et Vie, April 28, 19 12. 

The subject of my lecture is " The Soul and the 
Body." When I say that by this I mean Matter 
and Mind, you may fear that I am about to embark 
on a general disquisition concerning all that exists and 
even, it may be, a great deal that does not exist. But 
be reassured — it is not my intention to try to discover 
the fundamental nature of matter, much less the 
fundamental nature of mind. It is possible to distin- 
guish two things from one another, and to a certain 
point to determine their relations, without needing to 
know the nature of each of them. It is impossible 
for me at this moment to be acquainted with all of the 
people now around me, yet I distinguish myself from 
them and also see the place they occupy in relation to 
me. So in the case of the body and the soul; to 
define the essence of each would be a long and arduous 
undertaking; but it is easier to know what unites and 
what separates them, for their union and separation are 
facts of experience. 

First, then, what does the simple and direct experi- 

37 



3 8 MIND-ENERGY 

ence of common sense tell us on this point? Each of 
us is a body, subject to the same laws as all other por- 
tions of matter. When pushed, we advance; when 
pulled, we recoil; when lifted up and let go, we fall. 
But, besides these movements which are mechanically 
provoked by an external cause, there are others which 
seem to come from within and which cut across the 
first kind by their unforeseen character: they are 
called " voluntary." What is the cause of them? It 
is what each of us denotes by the words " I " or 
" me." And what is the "I"? Something which 
appears, rightly or wrongly, to overflow every part of 
the body which is joined to it, passing beyond it in 
space as well as in time. In space, for the body of 
each of us is confined within the distinct surfaces 
which bound it, whilst by our faculty of perception, 
and more especially of seeing, we radiate far beyond 
our bodies, even to the stars. In time, for the body 
is matter, matter is in the present, and, if it be true 
that the past leaves there traces of itself, they are not 
traces of the past except for a consciousness perceiving 
them and interpreting what it perceives by the light of 
what it remembers. This consciousness retains the 
past, enrolls what time unrolls, and with it prepares 
a future which it will itself help to create. Indeed, 
the voluntary act, of which I have just spoken, is noth- 
ing but a group of movements learnt in previous ex- 
perience, and inflected in a direction each time new by 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 39 

a conscious force whose main purpose appears to be 
the ceaseless bringing of something new into the 
world. Yes, it creates something new outside itself, 
since it outlines in space unforeseen, unforeseeable 
movements. And also it creates something new 
inside itself, since the voluntary action reacts on him 
who wills it, modifies in some degree the character 
of the person from whom it emanates, and accom- 
plishes, by a kind of miracle, that creation of self by 
itself which seems to be the very object of human life. 
To sum up, then, besides the body which is confined to 
the present moment in time and limited to the place it 
occupies in space, which behaves automatically and 
reacts mechanically to external influences, we appre- 
hend something which is much more extended than the 
body in space and which endures through time, some- 
thing which requires from, or imposes on, the body 
movements no longer automatic and foreseen, but un- 
foreseeable and free. This thing, which overflows the 
body on all sides and which creates acts by new-creating 
itself, is the " I," the "soul," the "mind" — mind 
being precisely a force which can draw from itself more 
than it contains, yield more than it receives, give more 
than it has. This is what I believe I see. Such is the 
appearance. 

Some one may say to me: "Very good, but it is 
only an appearance. " Look closer. Listen to what 
science says. " In the first place, you will yourself 



4 o MIND-ENERGY 

acknowledge that this ' soul ' is never seen at work 
without a body. Its body accompanies it from birth 
to death, and even supposing the soul be really dis- 
tinct from the body, everything happens as though 
it were inseparably united to it. Your consciousness 
vanishes if you inhale chloroform, it is heightened if 
you drink alcohol or coffee. A slight intoxication may 
set up troubles profoundly affecting intelligence, sensi- 
bility and will. A lasting intoxication, such as certain 
infectious diseases leave behind, will produce insanity. 
If it be true that the autopsy does not invariably dis- 
close lesions in the brain of the insane, at least it often 
does, and even when there is no visible lesion, it is 
probable that a chemical change in the tissues has 
caused the disease. Let us go further: science can 
localize in definite convolutions of the brain definite 
functions of the mind, such as the faculty of perform- 
ing voluntary movements, of which you spoke just now. 
Lesions of particular points in the Rolandic area, be- 
tween the frontal and the parietal lobes, involve the 
loss of movements of the arm, of the leg, of the face, 
of the tongue, according to the exact spot affected. 
Even memory, which you consider an essential function 
of the mind, has been partly localized. At the foot of 
the third left frontal convolution are seated the mem- 
ories of the movements of the articulation of speech; 
in one region between the first and second left temporal 
convolutions is preserved the memory of the sound of 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 41 

words; at the posterior part of the second left parietal 
convolution are deposited the visual images of words, 
and of letters, etc. Let us go further still. You said 
that in space, as in time, the soul overflows the body 
to which it is joined. Let us consider space. It is 
true that sight and hearing go beyond the limits of the 
body. But why? Because vibrations from afar have 
impressed eye and ear and been transmitted to the 
brain; there, in the brain, the stimulation has become 
auditory or visual sensation; perception is therefore 
within the body and not spread abroad. Let us con- 
sider time. You claim that the mind embraces the 
past, whilst the body is confined within a present which 
recommences without ceasing. But we recall the past 
only because our body preserves the still present traces 
of it. The impressions made by objects on the brain 
abide there like the images on a sensitive plate, or the 
records on gramophone disks. Just as the disk repeats 
the melody when the apparatus is set working, so the 
brain revives the memory when the requisite shock is 
produced at the point where the impression is re- 
tained. So then, no more in time than in space does 
the soul overflow the body. But is there really a soul 
distinct from the body? We have just seen that 
changes, or, to be more exact, displacements and new 
groupings of molecules and atoms are continually go- 
ing on in the brain. Some of these express themselves 
in what we call sensations, others in memories; without 



42 MIND-ENERGY 

any doubt brain-changes correspond to all intellectual, 
sensible and voluntary facts. To them consciousness 
is superadded, a kind of phosphorescence ; it is like the 
luminous trail of the match we strike on the wall in the 
dark. This phosphorescence, being, as it were, a self- 
illumination, begets strange internal optical illusions ; so 
consciousness imagines itself to be modifying, directing 
and producing the movements when in fact it is itself 
the result of them. The belief in free will consists in 
this. The truth is that could we look through the 
skull and observe the inner working of the brain with 
instruments magnifying some billion times more than 
our most powerful microscopes, if we then should wit- 
ness the dance of the molecules, atoms and electrons 
of which the cerebral cortex is composed, and if in 
addition we possessed the rule for transposing the 
cerebral into the mental, — a dictionary, so to speak, 
which would enable us to translate each figure of the 
dance into the language of thought and feeling, — we 
should know, quite as well as the supposed ' soul/ what 
it was thinking, feeling and wishing, what it would be 
believing itself doing freely, though it would only be 
acting mechanically. We should know it, indeed, much 
better than it could know itself, for this so-called con- 
scious * soul ' lights up only a small part of the intra- 
cerebral dance ; — the soul is only the assemblage of 
will-o-the-wisps which hover above certain privileged 
groups of atoms ; — whereas we should be observing all 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 43 

the groups of all the atoms, the whole intra-cerebral 
dance. Your * conscious soul ' is at most an effect 
which perceives effects : we should be seeing the effects 
and the causes." 

This is what is sometimes said in the name of 
science. But is it not clear that if by " scientific " we 
mean what is observed or observable, demonstrated 
or demonstrable, then a theory such as we have just 
sketched is not scientific, for in the present state of 
science we cannot even have a notion of the possi- 
bility of verifying it? It is alleged, it is true, that 
the law of the conservation of energy is opposed to 
the idea that even the smallest quantity of force or 
movement is created in the universe, and that if 
things did not behave mechanically in the manner just 
stated, and if an efficient will could intervene to per- 
form free actions, the law of the conservation of 
energy would be violated. But to reason thus is 
simply to beg the question, for the law of the con- 
servation of energy, like all physical laws, is no more 
than a deduction from observations of physical 
phenomena; it expresses what happens in a domain 
wherein no one has ever held that there was caprice, 
choice or liberty; and what precisely we want to know 
is whether it can still be verified in the cases in which 
consciousness (which, after all, is a faculty of observa- 
tion and which experiments in its own way) feels itself 
in possession of a free activity. Whatever is directly 



44 MIND-ENERGY 

presented to the senses or to consciousness, whatever 
is an object of experience, whether external or in- 
ternal, must be held to be real so long as it has not 
been proved to be a simple appearance. Now, that 
we feel ourselves free, that such is our immediate 
impression, is not in doubt. On those who hold that 
the feeling is illusory, then, falls the onus of proof, — 
and they can prove nothing of the kind, since all they 
can do is to extend arbitrarily to voluntary actions 
a law verified in cases in which the will does not in- 
tervene. I quite agree that, if the will is capable of 
creating energy, the quantity created may be so small 
that it would not affect sensibly our instruments of 
measurement, Yet its effect might be enormous, like 
that of the spark which explodes a powder-magazine. 
I will not enter into a thorough investigation of this 
point. It is enough for me to say that when we con- 
sider the mechanism of voluntary movement in particu- 
lar, the functioning of the nervous system in general, 
and in fact life itself in what is essential to it, we are 
led to the conclusion that the invariable contrivance 
of consciousness, from its most humble origin in ele- 
mentary living forms, is to convert physical determin- 
ism to its own ends, or rather to elude the law of 
conservation of energy whilst obtaining from matter a 
fabrication of explosives, ever intenser and more 
utilizable. It will then require an almost negligible 
action, such as the slight pressure of the finger on the 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 45 

hair-trigger of a pistol, in order to liberate at the 
required moment, in the direction chosen, as great an 
amount as is wanted of accumulated energy. The 
glycogen lodged in the muscles is, in fact, a real ex- 
plosive; by it voluntary movement is accomplished: 
to make and utilize explosives of this kind seems to be 
the unvarying and essential preoccupation of life, from 
its first apparition in protoplasmic masses, deform- 
able at will, to its complete expansion in organisms 
capable of free actions. But I will not dwell further 
on what after all is only a parenthesis; I have dealt 
with the subject elsewhere. So I come back to what 
I said at first, that it is impossible to call a thesis 
scientific which is neither proved nor even suggested 
by experience. 

What in fact does experience tell us? It tells us 
that the life of the soul, or, to use a term which does 
not appear to beg the question, the life of the mind, is 
bound to the life of the body, that there is solidarity 
between them, nothing more. But this point has never 
been contested by any one; it is a long way from that 
to maintain that the cerebral is the equivalent of the 
mental, that one might read in a brain whatever is 
taking place in the corresponding mind. A coat is 
solidary with the nail on which it hangs; it falls if the 
nail is removed; it sways if the nail is loose and shaken; 
it is torn or pierced if the nail is too pointed; it does 
not follow from all this that each detail of the nail 



46 MIND-ENERGY 

corresponds to a detail of the coat, nor that the nail is 
the equivalent of the coat, still less that nail and coat 
are the same thing. So, too, the mind is undeniably 
attached to the brain, but from this it does not in the 
least follow that in the brain is pictured every detail 
of the mind, nor that the mind is a function of the 
brain. All that observation, experience, and conse- 
quently science, allows us to affirm is the existence 
of a certain relation between brain and mind. 

What is this relation ? Ah ! We may indeed chal- 
lenge philosophy here! Has it ever really given us 
what we had the right to expect ? To philosophy falls 
the task of studying the life of the soul in all its 
manifestations. Practised in introspection, the phil- 
osopher ought to descend within himself, and then, re- 
mounting to the surface, follow the gradual movement 
by which consciousness detends, extends and prepares 
to evolve in space. Watching this progressive ma- 
terialization, marking the steps by which consciousness 
externalizes itself, at least he would obtain a vague 
intuition of what the insertion of mind in matter, the 
relation of body to soul, may be. No doubt it would 
be only a first glimmer, nothing more. But, had we 
only this glimmer, it would enable us to pick our way 
amongst the innumerable facts with which psychology 
and pathology deal. These facts, in their turn, cor- 
recting and completing what is incomplete or defective 
in the internal experience, would rectify the method 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 47 

of internal observation. Thus, by an indefinite series 
of comings and goings between two centres of observa- 
tion, one situated within, the other without, we should 
obtain a solution more and more adequate to the prob- 
lem, never perfect, as the solutions of metaphysicians 
too often claim to be, but always perfectible, like those 
of science. The first impulse would, it is true, have 
come from within; it is in the internal vision that we 
should have sought the chief enlightenment; and that 
is why the problem would remain what it must be, 
a problem of philosophy. 

But metaphysicians do not readily descend from 
the heights whereon they love to dwell. Plato invited 
philosophers to turn towards the world of Ideals. 
Willingly they visit in that society, mixing only with 
well-dressed concepts, offering them opportunities to 
meet and inter-marry, exerting in that aristocratic 
circle a refined diplomacy. It goes against them to 
come into touch with minute facts> especially with 
such facts as mental maladies for example : they would 
be afraid of making their hands dirty. Briefly, the 
theory which science had the right to demand from 
philosophy — a theory elastic and perfectible, moulded 
on the totality of known facts — philosophy has either 
not wished or not known how to give. 

Naturally enough, then, the scientist has said: 
" Since philosophy does not require me, by any facts 
and arguments, to restrict in any way or confine to any 



48 MIND-ENERGY 

definite points the correspondence between the cerebral 
and the mental, I shall treat it, provisionally at any 
rate, as if it were perfect, as if in fact between the 
two there is exact equivalence or even identity. As a 
physiologist, with the methods at my disposal — 
merely external methods of observation and experi- 
ment — I see only the brain and can only deal with the 
brain. I shall therefore proceed as if thought was 
only a function of the brain; I shall thus be able to 
advance with more boldness, and have many more 
chances of making progress. When we do not know 
the limit of our right, it is well to begin by acting as 
though there were no limit; there will always be time 
to draw back." This is how the scientist has regarded 
it, and, could he dispense with philosophy, this is all 
that he would have thought and said. 

But he cannot, and he does not, dispense with phil- 
osophy. As philosophers have not provided the 
plastic theory adaptable to the twofold experience, in- 
ternal and external, which science needs, the scientist 
has naturally accepted from the ancient metaphysic 
the ready-made and systematic doctrine which accorded 
best with the rule of method he had found it most 
useful to follow. There was really no choice. The 
only definite hypothesis which the metaphysics of the 
last three centuries has bequeathed us on this point 
is that of a strict parallelism between soul and body, 
the soul translating what the body does, or the body 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 49 

what the soul does, or both body and soul expressing, 
each in its own way, like translations of the same 
original in different languages, something which is 
neither the one nor the other. How had the phil- 
osophy of the seventeenth century been led to this con- 
clusion? Certainly not by the study of the anatomy 
or physiology of the brain, sciences then hardly in ex- 
istence, nor yet by the investigation of normal psychi- 
cal life and mental disease. No, the hypothesis had 
been deduced, naturally enough, from the general 
principles of a metaphysics conceived, at least in a large 
measure, in order to give substance to the hopes of 
modern physics. The discoveries which followed the 
Renaissance, especially those of Kepler and Galileo, 
had revealed the possibility of bringing down some 
astronomical and physical problems to those of me- 
chanics. Thence arose the idea that the whole ma- 
terial universe, organic and inorganic, might be an 
immense machine, governed by mathematical laws. 
And so, living bodies in general, the body of man in 
particular, must exactly fit into the machine, just as 
wheels in a clockwork mechanism; no one could do 
anything which was not pre-determined and mathemati- 
cally calculable. Consequently, the human soul must 
be incapable of creating; if it exist, its successive states 
must be limited to translating into the language of 
thought and feeling the same things which the body 
expresses in extension and in movement. Descartes, 



So MIND-ENERGY 

it is true, did not go so far: with his profound sense 
of reality, he preferred to allow free will a place in 
the world, even at the price of a slight inconsistency. 
And if, with Spinoza and Leibniz, this restriction dis- 
appeared, swept away by the logic of the system, if 
these two philosophers formulated in all its strictness 
the hypothesis of a constant parallelism between states 
of the body and states of the soul, at least they re- 
frained from representing the soul, as a simple reflexion 
of the body; they would just as well have said that 
the body was a reflexion of the soul. They had, how- 
ever, prepared the way for a Cartesianism curtailed 
and narrowed, according to which the mental life was 
only an aspect of the cerebral life, the would-be 
" soul " being nothing but the collection of those par- 
ticular cerebral phenomena to which consciousness 
supervenes like a phosphorescent glow. In fact, 
throughout the whole of the eighteenth century, we 
can follow the path of this progressive simplification 
of the Cartesian metaphysics. In the degree that it 
narrowed itself, it penetrated physiology, which natur- 
ally found it a philosophy well suited to give it the 
confidence in itself of which it had need. And it is 
thus that philosophers such as La Mettrie, Helvetius, 
Charles Bonnet, Cabanis, whose relationship to Car- 
tesianism is well known, brought to the science of the 
nineteenth century what it could best utilize of the 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 51 

metaphysics of the seventeenth. Now, that scientists 
who today philosophize on the relation of the psychical 
to the physical should rally to the hypothesis of paral- 
lelism is comprehensible enough, — metaphysicians 
cannot be said to have offered them anything else. 
That scientists should prefer the parallelist theory to 
any other to be obtained by the same method of a 
priori construction is easy also to understand, — they 
find in it an encouragement to go forward. But 
should any of them come and tell us they are actually 
talking science, that it is experience that reveals a 
strict and complete parallelism between the cerebral 
and mental life — " Ah, no ! " we reply: " Undoubt- 
edly you can hold this theory, as the metaphysician 
holds it, but then it is no longer the scientist in you 
who speaks, it is the metaphysician. You are simply 
returning what we have lent you. We are well ac- 
quainted with the doctrine you are offering us. It 
comes from our workshops. It is we, philosophers, 
who have made it; and it is old, very old ware. It is 
not, indeed, worth less on that account, but it is not 
worth more. Give it to us for what it is, and do not 
pass off as a result of science, as a theory modelled on 
facts and capable of being remodelled on them, a 
dotctrine which had taken, even before the dawn of 
our physiology and psychology, the perfect and defini- 
tive form which reveals a metaphysical construction." 



52 MIND-ENERGY 

Let me try then to formulate the relation of mental 
to cerebral activity, such as it appears when we set 
aside every preconceived idea in order to take account 
of only actually known facts. A formula of this kind, 
necessarily provisional, can only claim more or less 
probability. But at least the probability will be sus- 
ceptible of growing greater, the formula of becoming 
more and more exact, in proportion as the knowledge 
of the facts grows wider. 

A close examination of the life of the mind and of 
its physiological accompaniment leads me to believe 
that common sense is right and that there is infinitely 
more, in a human consciousness, than in the corre- 
sponding brain. This, in general, is the conclusion 
to which I have come. For the detailed argument 
which has led me to this conclusion I must refer to 
Matter and Memory, principally the second and third 
chapters. It seems to me that, were one able to 
look inside a brain in its full activity, follow the going 
and coming of the atoms and interpret all they were 
doing, he would doubtless know something of what 
was going on in the mind, but he would know very 
little. He would know so much of the state of the 
soul as can be expressed in bodily gestures and attitudes 
and movements, he would know all that it implies in 
the way of actions in the course of accomplishment or 
simply nascent; the rest would escape him. As re- 
gards the thoughts and feelings which were being un- 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 53 

rolled within the consciousness, he would be in the 
situation of the spectator seeing distinctly all that the 
actors were doing on the stage, but not hearing a word 
of what they were saying. Certainly the movements 
of the actors, their gestures and attitudes, have their 
ground in the play they are acting and if we know the 
text, we can in some measure foresee the gesture; but 
the reverse is not true : knowledge of the gestures tells 
us very little of the play, for there is much more in a 
play than the pantomime of the players. So, I believe 
if our science of cerebral mechanism were perfect, and 
our psychology also perfect, we should be able to di- 
vine what is happening in the brain during a definite 
state of mind; but I equally believe that the reverse 
would be impossible, since for one single condition of 
the brain we should have the choice of a host of equally 
appropriate states of mind. 

Note that I do not say that any state of mind can 
correspond to a given cerebral state. Suppose you 
have a frame, you cannot place any picture you like 
in it. The frame determines something of the picture, 
by eliminating beforehand all which have not the same 
shape and size. But, provided it is correct in these 
respects, the picture will fit the frame. So also with 
the brain and consciousness. Provided the compara- 
tively simple actions — gestures, attitudes, movements 
— in which a complex mental state would be material- 
ized, are such as the brain is ready for, the mental 



54 MIND-ENERGY 

state will insert itself exactly into the cerebral state. 
But there are a multitude of different pictures which 
would fit the frame equally well; consequently the 
brain does not determine thought and, at least to a 
large extent, thought is independent of the brain. 

The study of the facts will enable us to describe 
with increasing accuracy the particular aspect of mental 
life which alone, in my opinion, is delineated in cerebral 
activity. Is the mental fact our faculty of perceiving 
and feeling? Our body, inserted in the material 
world, receives stimulations, to which it must respond 
by appropriate movements; the brain, and indeed the 
cerebro-spinal system in general, is concerned with 
these movements, it holds the body ready for them; 
but perception itself is a wholly different thing. Is it 
our faculty of willing? The body carries out vol- 
untary movements by means of certain mechanisms set 
up in the nervous system and waiting only for the 
signal to start them; the brain is the point where 
the signal is given and also where the mechanism is 
operated. The Rolandic zone, where voluntary move- 
ment has been localized, is in fact comparable to a 
signal-box, from which the signalman shunts the com- 
ing train to its proper line. It is a sort of commuta- 
tor, by which a given external stimulus can be put in 
communication with any motor disposition whatever. 
But beside the organs of movement and the organ of 
choice, there is something different in kind — choice 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 55 

itself. Lastly, is it the faculty of thinking? When 
we think, it is seldom that we are not talking inwardly; 
we are outlining or preparing, if we are not actually 
making, the articulate movements by which our thought 
is expressed, and all these must be already delineated 
in the brain. But the cerebral mechanism of thought 
is not, in my view, limited to this. Besides these in- 
ternal movements of articulation, which are moreover 
not indispensable, there is something much more 
subtle, which is essential. I mean those nascent move- 
ments which translate symbolically the thousand suc- 
cessive directions of the thought. Remember that 
real concrete living thought is something of which 
psychologists have so far told us very little, because 
it is very ill adapted to internal observation. What 
is usually studied under this head is not so much 
thought itself as an artificial imitation of it obtained 
by putting together images and ideas. But with im- 
ages, and even with ideas, you can no more recon- 
stitute thinking than with positions you can make 
movement. The idea is a halt of thought; it arises 
when the thinking, instead of continuing its own train, 
makes a pause or is reflected back on itself. It is 
like the heat that produces itself in the projectile which 
encounters an obstacle. But it was no more a part 
of our thought, whilst we were thinking, than the 
heat was to be found in the projectile before the stop. 
Try, for example, by piecing together the ideas 



56 MIND-ENERGY 

" heat," " production " and " projectile,' , and inter- 
calating the ideas " inwardness " and " reflexion " ex- 
pressed in the words " in " and " itself," to reconstitute 
the thought I just expressed in the sentence " heat 
produces itself in the projectile." You will see that 
it is impossible, that the thought translated by the 
sentence is an indivisible movement, and that the ideas 
corresponding to each of the words are simply the 
images or concepts which would arise in the mind at 
each moment of the thinking if the thinking halted; 
but it does not halt. Put aside, then, artificial recon- 
structions of thinking; consider thinking itself; you 
will find directions rather than states, and you will see 
that thinking is essentially a continual and continuous 
change of inward direction, incessantly tending to 
translate itself by changes of outward direction, I 
mean by actions and gestures capable of outlining in 
space and of expressing metaphorically, as it were, the 
comings and goings of the mind. Of these move- 
ments, sketched out or even simply prepared, we are 
most often unaware, because we have no interest in 
knowing them; but we have to notice them when we 
try to seize hold of our thought in order to grasp it all 
living and make it pass, still living, into the soul of 
another. The words may then have been well chosen, 
they will not convey the whole of what we wish to make 
them say if we do not succeed by the rhythm, by the 
punctuation, by the relative lengths of the sentences and 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 57 

parts of the sentences, by a particular dancing of the 
sentence, in making the reader's mind, continually- 
guided by a series of nascent movements, describe a 
curve of thought and feeling analogous to that we our- 
selves describe. In this consists the whole art of writ- 
ing. It is somewhat like the art of the musician; but 
do not believe that such music is simply addressed to 
the ear, as is usually supposed. A foreigner, however 
trained his ear may be in music, will not recognize the 
difference between the prose we find musical and that 
which is not, between what is perfectly written in our 
language and what is but approximately so, — evident 
proof that we are dealing with something quite other 
than a material harmony of sounds. The truth is that 
the writer's art consists above everything in making 
us forget that he is using words. The harmony he 
seeks is a certain correspondence between the comings 
and goings of his mind and the phrasing of his speech, 
a correspondence so perfect that the waves of his 
thought, borne by the sentence, stir us sympathetically, 
and the words, taken individually, no longer count: 
there is nothing left but the flow of meaning which 
runs through the words, nothing but two minds which, 
without intermediary, seem to vibrate directly in 
unison with one another. The rhythm of speech has 
here, then, no other object than that or reproducing 
the rhythm of the thought: and what can the rhythm 
of the thought be but the rhythm of the scarcely con- 



58 MIND-ENERGY 

scious nascent movements which accompany it? These 
movements, by which thought continually tends to ex- 
ternalize itself in actions, are clearly prepared and, as 
it were, performed in the brain. It is this motor ac- 
companiment of thought, and not the thought itself, 
that we should probably perceive if we could pen- 
etrate into a brain at work. 

In other words, thought is directed towards action, 
and when it does not end in a real action, it sketches 
out one or several virtual, simply possible, actions. 
These real or virtual actions, which are the diminished 
and simplified projection of thought in space and which 
mark its motor articulations, are what is outlined of 
thought in the cerebral substance. The relation of the 
brain to thought is then complex and subtle. Were 
you to ask me to express it in a simple formula, nec- 
essarily crude, I should say that the brain is an organ 
of pantomime, and of pantomime only. Its part is to 
play the life of the mind, and to play also the external 
situations to which the mind must adapt itself. The 
work of the brain is to the whole of conscious life 
what the movements of the conductor's baton are to 
the orchestral symphony. As the symphony over- 
flows the movements which scan it, so the mental 
life overflows the cerebral life. But the brain, — pre- 
cisely because it extracts from the mental life whatever 
it has that may be played in movement, whatever is 
materializable, — precisely because it constitutes thus 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 59 

the point of insertion of mind in matter, — secures at 
every moment the adaptation of the mind to circum- 
stances, continually keeping the mind in touch with the 
realities. The brain is then, strictly speaking, neither 
an organ of thought nor of feeling nor of conscious- 
ness; but it keeps consciousness, feeling and thought 
tensely strained on life, and consequently makes them 
capable of efficacious action. Let us say, if you will, 
that the brain is the organ of attention to life. 

That is why there need be but a slight modification 
of the cerebral substance for the whole mind to be 
affected. I have referred to the effect of certain toxins 
on the consciousness, and more generally to the influ- 
ence of cerebral disease on the mental life. In these 
cases is it the mind itself, and not rather the mechan- 
ism of the insertion of the mind in things, which is 
deranged? When a madman raves, his reasoning may 
conform to the strictest logic; hearing a man under 
the delusion of persecution, you might sometimes say 
that it is by an excess of logic that he errs. What is 
wrong is not that he reasons badly, but that his reason- 
ing has lost contact with actuality as when one is 
dreaming. Let us suppose, as appears likely, that the 
disease has been caused by a certain intoxication of 
the cerebral substance. We must not suppose that 
the poison has gone to search out the reasoning in 
such or such cells of the brain, nor consequently that 
there were, at such or such points of the brain, atomic 



60 MIND-ENERGY 

movements corresponding to the reasoning. No, it 

is more probable that the whole brain is affected, just 

as a badly tied knot may make the whole rope slack. 

But just as a very slight loosening of the cable is 

enough to set the boat dancing on the waves, so even 

a slight modification of the whole cerebral substance 

can make the mind, losing its contact with the material 

things on which it is accustomed to lean, feel the 

reality fall away from under it, totter and be seized 

with giddiness. Indeed, it is by a feeling comparable 

to the sensation of giddiness that madness in many 

cases makes its first appearance. The patient feels 

bewildered, as if he were losing his way. He will tell 

you that the material objects have no longer for him 

their former solidity, relief and reafity. In fact, a 

loosening of the tension, or rather of the attention to 

life, which keeps the mind fixed on the part of the 

material world which concerns its action, such is the 

only direct result of cerebral derangement. For the 

brain is the assemblage of all the contrivances which 

allow the mind to respond to the action of things 

by motor reactions, effected or simply nascent, which 

secure by their accuracy the perfect insertion of the 

mind in reality. 

Such, in broad outline, seems to be the relation of 
the mind to the body. It is impossible for me here to 
enumerate the facts and arguments on which this con- 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 61 

ception is founded. And yet I cannot expect you to 
take my word. What am I to do ? There is one way, 
I think, in which it is possible to dispose finally of the 
theory I am opposing; and that is by showing that, 
taken literally, the hypothesis of an equivalence be- 
tween the cerebral and the mental is self-contradictory, 
that it requires us to adopt two opposite points of view 
at one and the same time and use two systems of nota- 
tion simultanenously when they are mutually exclusive. 
I attempted some years ago to prove this ; but although 
the argument is simple enough, it involves certain pre- 
liminary considerations concerning realism and idealism 
which would take some time to expound. I admit, 
moreover, that it is possible to give the theory of 
equivalence an appearance of intelligibility when we 
cease to push it in the materialist direction. And 
then again, though pure reasoning may suffice to prove 
the theory untenable, it does not and cannot tell us 
what to put in its place. So that it is to experience 
we have to address ourselves, as I have already 
hinted. But how could we review here the normal 
and pathological facts of which we must take account? 
To examine them all is impossible; to examine 
thoroughly any one of them would still be too long. 
The only way I see out of the difficulty is selecting, 
from among all the known facts, those which seem 
most favourable to the theory of parallelism. These 
without question are the facts of memory; in these 



62 MIND-ENERGY 

alone does the theory seem to find the beginning of 
verification. If, then, I could indicate in a few words 
how a thorough investigation of these facts would 
result in invalidating the theory which has appealed 
to them and in confirming that which I am putting 
forward, something at least would have been gained. 
It would not be the complete demonstration, far from 
it; but we should at least know where to seek for it. 
Let us try. 

The only function of thought which it has been 
possible actually to locate in the brain is memory — 
the memory of words, to be exact. I drew your at- 
tention, in the beginning of this lecture, to the manner 
in which the study of diseases affecting speech has led 
to localizing, in certain convolutions of the brain, cer- 
tain forms of verbal memory. Since Broca, who was 
the first to demonstrate that a lesion of the third left 
frontal convolution resulted in the forgetting of 
articulate speech. movements, a theory of aphasia and 
its cerebral conditions, more and more complicated, 
has been laboriously built up. On this theory I should 
have much to say. It has been opposed lately by in- 
vestigators of acknowledged competence, who base 
their arguments on a closer observation of the cerebral 
lesions which accompany maladies affecting speech. I 
myself, nearly twenty years ago (I mention the fact, 
not to make a merit of it, but in order to show that 
pure introspection may achieve results where methods 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 63 

believed more efficient fail), by analysis of the mechan- 
ism of speech and thought alone, was led to declare 
that the doctrine then considered unquestionable at 
least required revision. However, I shall leave all 
this aside. There is one point at least on which we all 
agree, namely, that diseases of word-memory are 
caused by lesions of the brain more or less clearly 
localizable. Let us see, then, how this fact is inter- 
preted by the doctrine according to which thought is a 
function of the brain, and more generally by the theory 
of those who believe in a parallelism or in an equiva- 
lence between the work of the brain and that of 
thought. 

Nothing is simpler than their explanation. The 
recollections are said to be there, stored in the brain 
in the form of modifications impressed on particular 
groups of anatomical elements : if they disappear from 
the memory, it is because the cells in which they lie 
are altered or destroyed. We spoke just now of 
sensitive plates and of phonograms. It is this sort of 
comparison we find in all the cerebral explanations 
of memory. Impressions made by external objects 
are supposed to subsist in the brain as it were on a 
sensitive plate or a phonographic disk. But, when we 
look more closely, we see how fallacious these compari- 
sons are. If, for example, the visual recollection of 
an object were really an impression left by that object 
on the brain, there would not be one recollection of an 



6 4 MIND-ENERGY 

object, there would be thousands or even millions of 
them; for the simplest and most stable object changes 
its form, its size and its shade of colour, according to 
the point of view from which it is perceived. Unless, 
then, I condemn myself to a position absolutely fixed 
when looking at it, unless my eye remains immovable 
in its socket, countless images in no way superposable 
will be outlined successively on my retina and trans- 
mitted to my brain. And what must the number of 
the images be if the visual image is of a person, whose 
expression changes, whose body is mobile, whose cloth- 
ing and environment are different each time I see him? 
Yet it is unquestionable that my consciousness presents 
to me a unique image, or, what amounts to the same, 
a practically invariable recollection of the object or 
person; evident proof that there is something quite 
different here from mechanical registration. Note 
that we might say just as much of the auditory recol- 
lection. The same word, pronounced by different per- 
sons, or by the same person at different times in 
different sentences, gives phonograms which do not 
coincide with one another. How, then, can the recol- 
lection of the sound of a word — a recollection which 
is relatively invariable and unique — be comparable 
to a phonogram? This consideration alone would be 
enough in itself to throw suspicion on the theory which 
attributes diseases affecting the memory of words to an 
alteration or a destruction of the recollections them- 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 6$ 

selves, automatically registered by the cerebral cortex. 
But let us see what actually occurs in these 
diseases. When the cerebral lesion is severe, and the 
word-memory is deeply affected, it may happen that 
a more or less vigorous stimulus, an emotion, for ex- 
ample, will suddenly bring back the recollection which 
had seemed lost for ever. Could this be possible, if 
the recollection had been originally deposited in the 
cerebral matter which has suffered injury or destruc- 
tion? Things happen much more as if the brain 
served to recall the recollection, and not to store it. 
The sufferer from aphasia becomes incapable of finding 
the word when he wants it; he seems to be feeling 
his way all around it, lacking the desired power of 
putting his finger on the exact point he wants; in the 
psychological domain, indeed, the external sign of 
strength is always precision. But the recollection, to 
all appearance, is there; and sometimes, when replac- 
ing by paraphrases the word which he thinks lost, the 
patient may actually bring the right word into one of 
them. What has become enfeebled in his case is 
that " adjustment to the situation " which the cerebral 
mechanism is contrived to secure. Or, to speak more 
precisely, what is affected is the faculty of evoking the 
recollection by sketching in advance the movements 
in which the recollection, if it were there, would be 
prolonged. When we have forgotten a proper name, 
how do we set about recalling it? We try with all 



66 MIND-ENERGY 

the letters of the alphabet one after the other; we 
pronounce them inwardly first of all, then, if that is not 
enough, out loud; we thus place ourselves in turn in 
all the various motor dispositions between which we 
have to choose. Once the desired attitude is found, 
the sound of the word sought slips into it, as into a 
frame prepared to receive it. It is this play, real or 
virtual, actually performed or merely sketched out, 
that the cerebral mechanism has to secure. And it is 
this, probably, that the disease attacks. 

Consider now what takes place in progressive 
aphasia, that is to say, when the loss of words goes 
on increasing. In most cases, the words then disap- 
pear in a definite order, as if the disease knew gram- 
mar. The first to suffer eclipse are proper nouns, 
then common nouns, then adjectives and finally verbs. 
Now this, no doubt, at first sight appears to confirm 
the hypothesis of an accumulation of recollections in 
the cerebral substance. Proper names, common 
names, adjectives and verbs will be said to form, so 
to speak, so many superposed layers, and the lesion 
to destroy these layers one after the other. Yes, but 
the disease may be due to the most different causes, 
may assume the most varied forms, may break out at 
any point whatever in the cerebral region concerned 
and spread in any direction, yet the order in which 
recollections disappear is always the same. Would 
this be possible, if it were the recollections themselves 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 67 

which the disease attacks? The fact must therefore 
have a quite different explanation. Here is the very 
simple interpretation which I offer you. First, if 
proper names disappear before common names, these 
before adjectives, and adjectives before verbs, the 
reason is that it is harder to remember a proper name 
than a common name, a common name than an ad- 
jective, and an adjective than a verb, and that the 
function of recall, in which evidently the brain is con- 
cerned, must confine itself to the more easy cases ac- 
cording as the lesion of the brain increases in severity. 
But why is there greater or less difficulty in the recall 
of the different classes of words? And why are the 
verbs of all words those we have the least trouble in 
evoking? It is simply because verbs express actions, 
and actions may be mimicked. The verb is directly 
expressible in action, the adjective only by the media- 
tion of the verb, the substantive by the double media- 
tion of the adjective which express one of its attributes 
and the verb implied in the adjective, the proper name 
by the triple mediation of the common noun, the ad- 
jective and also the verb: therefore, according as we 
go from the verb to the proper noun, we get farther 
and farther away from directly imitable action, action 
the body can play, and a more and more complicated 
device becomes necessary in order to symbolize in 
movement the idea expressed by the required word. 
Now, since the task of preparing these movements 



68 MIND-ENERGY 

falls to the brain, and since the functioning of the 
brain is diminished, reduced and simplified in propor- 
tion to the extent and severity of the lesion in the 
region concerned, it is not surprising that an altera- 
tion or destruction of tissues, making the evocation of 
proper and common nouns as well as of adjectives 
impossible, should still allow that of the verb to re- 
main. Here, as elsewhere, facts seem to point to the 
cerebral activity as being the pantomime part of the 
mental activity, and not in any sense its equivalent. 

But if the recollection has not been stored by the 
brain, where then has it been preserved? Strictly 
speaking, I am not sure that the question " where " 
can have a meaning when we ask it of something dif- 
ferent from a body. Sensitive plates are stored in 
a box, phonographic rolls in cases; but why should 
recollections, which are neither visible nor tangible, 
need a container, and how could they have one? I 
will however accept, if you insist, but in a purely 
metaphorical sense, the idea of a container in which 
recollections are lodged, and I say then quite frankly 
they are in the mind. I make no hypothesis, I do 
not call in aid a mysterious entity, I confine myself to 
observation. For there is nothing more immediately 
given, nothing more evidently real, than conscious- 
ness, and mind is consciousness. Now, consciousness 
signifies, before everything, memory. At this moment 
that I am conversing with you, I pronounce the word 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 69 

11 conversation." Clearly my consciousness presents 
the word all at once, otherwise it would not be a whole 
word, and would not convey a single meaning. Yet, 
when I pronounce the last syllable of the word, the 
three first have already been pronounced; they are 
past with regard to the last one, which must then be 
called the present. But I did not pronounce this last 
syllable " tion " instantaneously. The time, however 
short, during which I uttered it is decomposable into 
parts, and all of these parts are past in relation to 
the last among them. This last would be the defini- 
tive present, were it not, in its turn, decomposable. 
So that, however you try, you cannot draw a line 
between the past and the present, nor consequently 
between memory and consciousness. To make the 
brain the depository of the past, to imagine in the 
brain a certain region in which the past, once past, 
dwells, is to commit a psychological error, to attribute 
a scientific value to a distinction entirely practical, for 
there is no exact moment when the present becomes 
the past, nor consequently when preception becomes 
recollection. As a matter of fact, when I pronounce 
the word " conversation," there is present in my mind 
not only the beginning, the middle, and the end of the 
word, but also the words which preceded it and all 
the beginning of the sentence ; otherwise I should have 
lost the thread of my speech. Now, if the punctuation 
of my speech had been different, my sentence might 



7 o MIND-ENERGY 

have begun sooner; it might, for example, have em- 
braced all the preceding sentence, and my " present " 
would have been still more extended into the past. 
Push the argument to its limit, suppose that my speech 
had been lasting for years, since the first awakening 
of my consciousness, that it had been carried on in 
one single sentence, and that my consciousness were 
sufficiently detached from the future, disinterested 
enough in action, to be able to employ itself entirely 
in embracing the total meaning of the sentence: then 
I should no more seek the explanation of the integral 
preservation of this entire past than I seek the ex- 
planation of the preservation of the three first syllables 
of " conversation " when I pronounce the last syllable. 
Well, I believe that our whole psychical existence is 
something just like this single sentence, continued since 
the first awakening of consciousness, interspersed with 
commas, but never broken by full stops. And con- 
sequently I believe that our whole past still exists. It 
exists subconsciously, by which I mean that it is present 
to consciousness in such a manner that, to have the 
revelation of it, consciousness has no need to go out of 
itself or seek for foreign assistance; it has but to re- 
move an obstacle, to withdraw a veil, in order that all 
that it contains, all in fact that it actually is, may be 
revealed. Fortunate are we to have this obstacle, 
infinitely precious to us is the veil ! The brain is what 
secures to us this advantage. It keeps our attention 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 71 

fixed on life ; and life looks forward ; it looks back only 
in the degree to which the past can aid it to illumine 
and prepare the future. To live is, for the mind, es- 
sentially to concentrate itself on the action to be accom- 
plished. To live is to be inserted in things by means 
of a mechanism which draws from consciousness all 
that is utilizable in action, all that can be acted on the 
stage, and darkens the greater part of the rest. Such 
is the brain's part in the work of memory: it does not 
serve to preserve the past, but primarily to mask it, 
then to allow only what is practically useful to emerge 
through the mask. Such, too, is the part the brain 
plays in regard to the mind generally. Extracting 
from the mind what is externalizable in movement, 
inserting the mind into this motor frame, it causes it 
to limit its vision, but also it makes its action efficacious. 
This means that the mind overflows the brain on all 
sides, and that cerebral activity responds only to a 
very small part of mental activity. 

But this also means that mental life cannot be an 
effect of bodily life, that it looks much more as if the 
body were simply made use of by the mind, and that 
we have, therefore, no reason to suppose the body 
and the mind united inseparably to one another. I 
should not think of attacking, during the few minutes 
that are left to us, the most formidable problem that 
humanity can face. But still less should I think of 
stealing away from it. Whence do we come ? What 



72 MIND-ENERGY 

are we doing here? Whither are we bound? If phil- 
osophy could really offer no answer to these questions 
of vital interest, if it were incapable of gradually 
elucidating them as we elucidate problems of biology 
or history, if it were unable to forward the study of 
them through an experience ever more profound and 
a vision of reality ever more piercing, if it were bound 
to be nothing better than an endless tournament be- 
tween those who affirm and those who deny immortal- 
ity by deductions from the hypothetical essence of the 
soul or of the body, we could well indeed say, — to 
adopt a phrase of Pascal, — that the whole of philo- 
sophy is not worth an hour's trouble. True, immortal- 
ity cannot indeed be proved experimentally, for 
experience can only be experience of a limited duration; 
and when religion speaks of immortality, it appeals 
to revelation. But it would be something, it would 
indeed be a great step forward, were we able to es- 
tablish on the ground of experience the possibility, 
much more were it the probability, of survival for a 
time. The question whether this time is finite or in- 
finite could be left outside the domain of philosophy. 
Well, reduced to these modest proportions, the phil- 
osophic problem of the destiny of the soul does not 
seem to me in the least insoluble. Here is a brain 
which works; and here is a consciousness which feels, 
thinks and wills. If the work of the brain corre- 
sponded to the totality of the consciousness, if there 



THE SOUL AND THE BODY 73 

were equivalence between the cerebral and the mental, 
consciousness might be bound up with the destiny of 
the brain and death might be the end of all. Experi- 
ence, at any rate, would not speak to the contrary, and 
the philosopher who affirms survival would then have 
to support his theory by some metaphysical construc- 
tion — usually a fragile thing. But if, as I have tried 
to show, the mental life overflows the cerebral life, if 
the brain does but translate into movements a small 
part of what takes place in consciousness, then survival 
becomes so probable that the onus of proof falls on 
him who denies it rather than on him who affirms it; 
for the only reason we can have for believing in the 
extinction of consciousness at death is that we see the 
body become disorganized, that this is a fact of ex- 
perience, and the reason loses its force if the independ- 
ence of almost the whole of consciousness with regard 
to the body has been shown to be also a fact of experi- 
ence. In thus treating the problem of survival, in 
bringing it down from the heights on which traditional 
metaphysics has placed it, in transporting it into the 
field of experience, we are no doubt renouncing the 
immediate finding of a complete and radical solution. 
But what should we do ? We have to choose, in phil- 
osophy, between the method of pure reasoning, which 
aims at a complete and decisive result, unable to be 
perfected since it is supposed to be perfect, and an 
empirical method, content with approximate results 



74 MIND-ENERGY 

which can be endlessly corrected and enlarged. The 
first method, because it aims at making us immediately 
certain, condemns us to remain always in the simply 
probable or rather in the purely possible, for it is rare 
that it cannot serve to demonstrate indifferently either 
of two opposed theories equally coherent and equally 
plausible. The second aims first at simple probability, 
but since it works on a plane where probability may 
increase indefinitely, it brings us gradually to a state 
practically equivalent to certainty. Between these two 
ways of philosophizing I have long since made my 
choice. I shall be happy if, in however small a degree, 
I have helped to make yours. 



Ill 



44 PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING " AND 
14 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH " 

Presidential Address to the Society for Psychical Research, 
London, May 28, 191 3. 

Let me say at once how much I appreciate the great 
honour you have done me in electing me President of 
your Society. I am conscious I have done nothing 
to deserve it. It is only by reading that I know any- 
thing of the phenomena with which the Society deals; 
I have seen nothing myself, I have examined nothing 
myself. How is it, then, that you have come to choose 
me to succeed the eminent men who have occupied in 
turn the presidential chair, all experts in these studies? 
I suspect that there is in this a case of telepathy or 
clairvoyance, that you felt from afar the interest I was 
taking in your researches, and that you perceived me, 
across the two hundred and fifty miles of space, atten- 
tively reading your Proceedings and following with 
keen curiosity your work. The ingenuity, the penetra- 
tion, the patience, the tenacity you have shown in the 
exploration of the terra incognita of psychical 
phenomena have always appeared to me truly admira- 
ble. But still more than the ingenuity and the penetra- 

75 



76 MIND-ENERGY 

tion, still more than the unwearying perseverance with 
which you have continued your course, I admire the 
courage which it has required, especially during the 
first years, to struggle against the prejudices of a great 
part of the scientific world, and to brave the mockery 
which strikes fear into the boldest breast. This is 
why I am proud — prouder than I can say — to have 
been elected President of the Society for Psychical Re- 
search. I have read somewhere the story of a sub- 
lieutenant whom the chances of the battle, — the death 
or wounds of his superiors, — had raised to the honour 
of the command of his regiment : — all his life he 
thought of it, all his life he talked of it, the memory of 
those few hours suffused his whole existence. I am 
that sub-lieutenant, and I shall always pride myself on 
the happy chance which has set me — not for a few 
hours, but for some months — at the head of a valiant 
regiment. 

How are we to explain the prejudice there always 
has been, and still is, against psychical science? True, 
it is more often the smatterer than the scientist who 
takes upon himself to condemn your researches " in 
the name of Science." Physicists, chemists, physio- 
logists, physicians belong to your society, and besides 
these there are an increasing number of men of science 
who, without belonging to you, are interested in the 
work you are doing. Yet it is none the less true that 
there are scientific workers of repute, men ready to 



" PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING " 77 

welcome any laboratory work, however restricted and 
minute it be, who yet dismiss with a foregone con- 
clusion what you bring forward and reject outright all 
you have done. What is their ground for this? It 
is on that point I will speak first. Far from me is 
the intention of criticizing their criticism for the sake 
of criticizing. It seems to me that in philosophy 
the time given up to refutation is generally time lost. 
Of the many objections raised by so many thinkers 
against one another, what remains? Nothing, or next 
to nothing. That which counts, that which lasts, is 
the positive truth we bring out; the true idea pushes 
out the false one by its mere weight and thus proves to 
be, without our refuting anybody, the best of refuta- 
tions. But quite another thing is here in question 
than either refuting or criticizing. I want to show 
that behind the prejudices of some, the mockery of 
others, there is, present and invisible, a certain 
metaphysic unconscious of itself, — unconscious and 
therefore inconsistent, unconscious and therefore in- 
capable of continually remodelling itself on observation 
and experience as every philosophy worthy of the name 
must do, — that, moreover, this metaphysic is natural, 
due at any rate to a bent contracted long ago by the 
human mind, and this explains its persistence and popu- 
larity. I would tear away the mask which hides it, go 
right at it and see what it is worth. But, before doing 
so and thus coming to the subject of your research, I 



78 MIND-ENERGY 

wish to say a word on your method, a method which I 
can well understand is disconcerting to a certain num- 
ber of men of science. 

There is nothing more displeasing to the profes- 
sional student than to see introduced into a science, 
of the same order as his own, methods of research and 
verification from which he has himself always carefully 
abstained. He fears the contagion. Quite legiti- 
mately, he holds to his method as the workman to his 
tools. He loves it for itself, and not only for what 
it does. It was William James, I think, who defined 
the difference between the professional and the 
amateur by saying that the latter interests himself 
especially in the result obtained, the former in the way 
in which he obtains it. Well, the phenomena with 
which you are occupied are undeniably of the same 
kind as those which form the subject-matter of natural 
science, whilst the method you follow, and are obliged 
to follow, has often no relation to that of any of the 
natural sciences. 

I say they are facts of the same kind. I mean by 
this that they are subject to laws, and that they are 
capable of being repeated indefinitely in time and in 
space. They are not facts like those, for instance, 
with which the historian deals. History does not 
repeat itself. The battle of Austerlitz was fought 
once, and it will never be fought again. It being 
impossible that the same historical conditions should 



11 PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING " 79 

ever be reproduced, the same historical fact cannot 
be repeated; and as a law expresses necessarily that 
to certain causes, always the same, there will corre- 
spond effects, also always the same, history, strictly 
speaking, has no bearing on laws, but on particular 
facts and on the no less particular circumstances in 
which they were brought to pass. The only question, 
here, is to know if the event did really take place at 
such and such a definite moment of time and at such 
and such a determinate point of space, and in what 
way it was brought about. On the contrary, a 
veridical hallucination, — the apparition, for instance, 
of a sick or dying man to a relation or friend far away, 
it may be at the antipodes, — is a fact which, if it 
be real, is unquestionably the manifestation of a law 
analogous to physical, chemical and biological laws. 
Suppose, let us say, that this phenomenon were due 
to the action of the consciousness of one of the two 
persons on the consciousness of the other, that there- 
fore some minds were able to communicate without 
any visible intermedium, that there were what you 
call " telepathy." If telepathy be a real fact, it is 
a fact capable of being repeated indefinitely. I go 
further: if telepathy be real, it is possible that it is 
operating at every moment and everywhere, but with 
too little intensity to be noticed, or else in such a way 
that a cerebral mechanism stops the effect, for our 
benefit, at the very moment at which it is about to 



80 MIND-ENERGY 

clear the threshold of consciousness. We produce 
electricity at every moment, the atmosphere is continu- 
ally electrified, we move among magnetic currents, 
yet for thousands of years millions of human beings 
have lived who never suspected the existence of elec- 
tricity. We might very well have gone on without 
perceiving it, and it may be that this is now our case 
with telepathy. But what is indisputable in any case 
is that if telepathy be real, it is natural, and that 
whenever the day comes that we know its conditions, 
it will no more be necessary to wait for a " phantasm 
of the living " in order to obtain a telepathic effect 
than it is necessary for us now, if we wish to see an 
electric spark, to wait until it pleases the heavens to 
make it appear during a thunderstorm. 

Here, then, is a phenomenon which it would seem 
ought, by reason of its nature, to be studied in the 
way we study a physical, chemical or biological fact. 
It is not so. You are obliged to begin with an en- 
tirely different method, one which stands midway 
between that of the historian and that of the magis- 
trate. Did the veridical hallucination take place in 
the past? — You study documents, you criticize them, 
you write a page of history. Is it a fact of today? 
— -You proceed to a kind of judicial inquiry; you ex- 
amine the witnesses, confront them with one another, 
and weigh the value of their evidence. For my part, 
when I bring to mind the results of the admirable 



"PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING" 81 

inquiry you have conducted continually during more 
than thirty years; when I think of all the precautions 
you have taken to avoid error; when I see that, as a 
rule, you only took into account cases in which the 
hallucination had been related by the percipient to 
some other person or persons, often even noted down 
in writing, before it had been found veridical; when 
I bear in mind the enormous number of the facts, and 
especially their resemblance, the family likeness be- 
tween them, the agreement of so many witnesses in- 
dependent of one another, all examined, their testi- 
mony weighed and submitted to criticism : I am led to 
believe in telepathy, just as I believe in the defeat of 
the Invincible Armada. My belief has not the 
mathematical certainty which the demonstration of 
Pythagoras's theorem gives me, it has not the physical 
certainty which the verification of Galileo's law brings 
me, but it has at least all the certainty which we can 
obtain in historical or judicial matters. 

But this is just what is disconcerting to so many 
minds. Without entirely realizing that this is the 
cause of their repugnance, they find it strange that we 
should have to treat historically or judicially facts 
which, if they be real, surely obey laws, and ought 
then, it seems, to be amenable to the methods of ob- 
servation and experiment used in the natural sciences. 
Arrange for the fact to be produced in a laboratory, 
they will receive it gladly; till then, they hold it sus- 



82 MIND-ENERGY 

pect. Just because " psychical research " cannot pro- 
ceed like physics and chemistry, they conclude it is not 
scientific; and as the " psychical phenomenon " has not 
yet taken that simple and abstract form which opens 
to a fact access to the laboratory, they are pleased to 
declare it unreal. Such, I think, is the " subcon- 
scious " reasoning of some men of science. 

I discover the same feeling, the same disdain for 
the concrete, at the root of the objections that are 
raised against many of your conclusions. I will cite 
only one example. Some time ago, I was at a dinner 
party at which the conversation happened to turn on 
the phenomena which your Society investigates. 
There was an eminent physician present, one of our 
leading men of science. After listening attentively, 
he joined in the conversation, expressing himself, as 
nearly as I remember, in these words : " All that you 
are saying interests me very much, but I ask you to 
reflect before drawing a conclusion. I also myself 
know an extraordinary fact. I can guarantee its 
authenticity, for it was related to me by a lady highly 
intellectual, whose word inspires me with absolute 
confidence. The husband of this lady was an officer. 
He was killed in the course of an engagement. Well, 
at the very moment when the husband fell, the wife 
had the vision of the scene, a clear vision, in all points 
conformable to the reality. You may perhaps con- 
clude from that, as she herself did, that it was a case 



" PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING " 83 

of clairvoyance or of telepathy? . . . You forget one 
thing, however, and that is that it has happened many 
times that a wife has dreamed that her husband was 
dead or dying, when he was quite well. We notice 
cases in which the vision turns out to be true, but take 
no count of the others. Were we to make the full 
return, we should see that the coincidence is the work 
of chance." 

The conversation turned off in I know not what 
direction; there was no question of philosophical 
discussion, it was neither the time nor the place for 
it. But, when we left the table, a young girl who 
had been listening attentively came and said to me, 
" It seems to me that the doctor argued wrongly 
just now. I do not see what the fallacy in his argu- 
ment was, but there must have been a fallacy." 
Yes, indeed, there was a fallacy 1 The child was 
right and the learned doctor wrong. He shut his 
eyes to what was concrete in the phenomenon. He 
argued thus : " When a dream or an hallucination 
informs us that a relation is dead or dying, either it 
is true or it is false; either the person dies or does 
not die. And consequently, if the vision proves true, 
it is necessary, in order to be sure that it is not an 
effect of chance, to have compared the number of true 
cases with the number of false cases." He did not 
see that his argument rested on a substitution; he 
had replaced the description of the concrete and living 



84 MIND-ENERGY 

scene, — the officer falling at a given moment, in a 
definite spot, with such and such soldiers around him, 
— by this abstract and dead formula : — " The lady's 
case was one of the true class, and not one of the 
false." Ah, if we accept this transposition into the 
abstract, we must then indeed compare in abstracto 
the number of true cases, with the number of false, 
and we shall find perhaps that there are more false 
than true, and the doctor will then be right. But this 
abstraction consists in neglecting the essential, — the 
picture which the lady perceived, and which was found 
to reproduce a complicated scene very distant from her. 
Do you suppose that a painter, composing the picture 
of a battle and trusting to his fancy, could be so well 
favoured by chance as to find that he had produced the 
likeness of real soldiers, present that day at a battle, 
and that they had stood there in the attitudes he had 
portrayed? Evidently not. The calculus of prob- 
abilities, to which the doctor made appeal, would in 
this case show that it is impossible. For a scene in 
which definite persons take definite attitudes in a thing 
unique of its kind; the lineaments of a human face are 
unique in their kind : therefore each personage — much 
more the scene which includes them — is decomposable 
into an infinity of details all independent of one an- 
other. So that an infinite number of coincidences is 
needed in order that chance should make a fancied 
scene the reproduction of a real scene (and even then 



"PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING" 85 

we leave out of account the coincidence in time, that is, 
the fact that two scenes whose content is identical have 
chosen for their apparition the same moment). In 
other words, it is mathematically impossible that a 
picture drawn from the painter's imagination should 
portray part of a battle such as it was. Well, the lady 
who had the vision of a part of a battle was in the sit- 
uation of that painter; her imagination executed a pic- 
ture. If the picture was the reproduction of a real 
scene, it must, by every necessity, be because she per- 
ceived that scene or was in communication with a con- 
sciousness that perceived it. I do not need to com- 
pare the number of " true cases " with the number of 
"false cases"; statistics have nothing to do with it; 
the unique case which is presented to me is sufficient, 
provided I take it with all that it contains. And so, 
if it had been an occasion to discuss with the doctor, I 
should have said to him: "I do not know if the 
story which was told you is worthy of credence; I do 
not know if the lady had the vision of the actual scene 
which was going on, at the time, far away from her; 
but if this were proved to me, if I could be sure that 
even the countenance of one soldier unknown by her, 
present at the scene, had appeared to her such as it 
was in reality, — then, even if it should be proved to 
me that there had been thousands of false visions, 
and even though there had never been a veridical hal- 
lucination except this one, I should hold the reality 



86 MIND-ENERGY 

of telepathy — or more generally the possibility of 
perceiving objects and events which our senses, with 
all the aid which instruments can bring them, are in- 
capable of attaining — to be strictly and unquestion- 
ably established." 

But enough on this point; let me come at once to 
the deep-seated cause which, in directing the activity 
of workers in science exclusively in another direction, 
has until now retarded " psychical research." 

One is at times astonished that modern science 
should be disdainful of the facts which interest you, 
when it ought, being experimental, to welcome what- 
ever is matter of observation and experiment. But 
we must understand the experimental character of 
modern science. Modern science has created the ex- 
perimental method ; so much is certain ; but that is not 
equivalent to saying that it has enlarged in all direc- 
tions the field of experience on which one worked be- 
fore. Quite the contrary, it has often narrowed it in 
more than one point; moreover, it is in this that its 
force lies. Long before modern science, men observed 
and even experimented. But they observed at random 
and in no definite direction. In what did the creation 
of the "experimental method" consist? In taking 
certain processes of observation and experiment which 
already existed and, instead of applying them in all 
possible directions, making them converge on one 
single point, measurement, — the measurement of such 



44 PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING n 87 

or such a variable magnitude which we suspect may be 
a function of such or such other variable magnitudes, 
equally measurable. " Law," in the modern sense of 
the word, is rightly the expression of a constant rela- 
tion between magnitudes which vary. Modern 
science, then, is the offspring of mathematics, begotten 
on the day when algebra had acquired sufficient force 
and pliability to be able to enfold reality, to draw it 
into the net of its calculations. First appeared as- 
tronomy and mechanics, under the mathematical form 
which the moderns have given them. Then was de- 
veloped physics — a physics equally mathematical. 
Physics gave rise to chemistry, this also being founded 
on measurements, on comparisons of weights and vol- 
umes. After chemistry came biology, which, indeed, 
is still without mathematical form and seems far from 
acquiring it, but which seeks none the less, by means 
of physiology, to bring down the laws of life to those 
of chemistry and physics, — indirectly, then to those of 
mechanics. So that, in short, our science always tends 
to mathematics as to an ideal. It seems essential to 
it to measure, and wherever calculation is not yet ap- 
plicable, wherever it must limit itself to description or 
analysis, it manages to set before itself only the side 
which later may become amenable to measurement. 

Now, it is of the essence of mental things that 
fliey do not lend themselves to measurement. The 
first movement of modern science was bound, then, to 



88 MIND-ENERGY 

be to find out whether it was not possible to substitute, 
for the phenomena of the mind, phenomena which are 
measurable and which could be their equivalent. Now 
we see, as a fact, that consciousness has some relation 
to the brain. So modern science seized upon the 
brain, took hold of the cerebral fact,- — the nature of 
which, indeed, we do not know, but we do know that 
it must finally resolve itself into movements of mole- 
cules and atoms, that is to say, into facts of a mechani 
cal order, — and determined to consider the cerebra 
as the equivalent of the mental. All our menta 
science, all our metaphysics, from the seventeenth cen 
tury until the present day, proclaims this equivalence 
We speak of thought and of the brain indifferently 
either we consider the mental a simple " epiphenom 
enon " of the cerebral, as materialism does, or we put 
the mental and the cerebral on the same level, regard- 
ing them as two translations, in different languages, of 
the same original. In short, the hypothesis that there 
is a strict parallelism between the cerebral and the 
mental appears eminently scientific. Instinctively, 
philosophy and science tend to cast aside whatever 
would contradict this hypothesis or fit ill with it. And 
this at first sight appears to be the case with the facts 
which " psychical research " deals with, or at least it 
might be so with a good number of them. 

Well, the moment has come to consider closely this 
hypothesis, and to see what it is worth. I will not in- 



" PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING " 89 

sist on the theoretical difficulties it raises. I have 
shown elsewhere that, taken literally, it is a self-con- 
tradiction. Moreover, it is not likely that nature has 
indulged in the luxury of repeating in the language of 
consciousness what the cerebral cortex expresses in 
atomic or molecular movements. For every super- 
fluous organ atrophies, every useless function disap- 
pears. A consciousness which is only a duplicate, 
unable to intervene actively, would have long since 
disappeared from the universe, supposing it had ever 
been produced. Do we not see that our actions be- 
come unconscious in the degree that habit renders 
them mechanical? But I will not insist on these the- 
oretical considerations. What I claim is that the 
facts, looked at without any prepossession, neither con- 
firm nor even suggest the hypothesis of parallelism. 

There is but one intellectual faculty which at first 
sight we might believe ourselves authorized by experi- 
ence to speak of as definitely localized in the brain: 
that is memory, and more particularly word-memory. 
In regard to judgment, reasoning or any other act of 
thought, there is not the slightest reason to suppose 
that they are attached to intra-cerebral movements 
of which they would then be, so to say, the con- 
scious underlining. But maladies that affect word- 
memory, or, as they are called, cases of aphasia, on 
the contrary do correspond with lesions of certain 
cerebral convolutions: so that it has been thought 



go MIND-ENERGY 

possible to consider memory as a mere function of 
the brain, and to believe that visual, auditory, and 
motor recollections of words are deposited inside the 
cortex, — photographic plates which preserve luminous 
impressions, phonographic disks which are registers of 
sound vibrations. Examine closely the facts alleged 
in favour of an exact correspondence and of a kind of 
adherence of the mental to the cerebral life (I set 
aside, it goes without saying, sensations and move- 
ments, for the brain is certainly a sensori-motor or- 
gan) : you will see that these facts reduce themselves 
to the phenomena of memory, and that it is the localiz- 
ation of aphasia, and that localization alone, which 
seems to bring a beginning of experimental proof to 
the support of the parallelist doctrine. 

Now, a closer study of the various cases of aphasia 
shows the impossibility of supposing that recollections 
are deposited in the brain on the analogy of photo- 
graphic plates or phonographic records. In my view, 
the brain does not preserve the ideas or images of the 
past, it simply stores motor habits. I will not repeat 
here the criticism of the current interpretation of 
aphasia in my Matter and Memory t a criticism which 
appeared paradoxical, which went against a scientific 
dogma, but which the progress of pathological an- 
atomy has come to confirm (I refer to the works of 
Professor Pierre Marie and of his pupils). I will 
Confine myself to recalling to you my conclusions. 



"PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING " 91 

What appears to me to stand out clearly from an at- 
tentive study of the facts is that the characteristic 
cerebral lesions of the various forms of aphasia do 
not touch the recollections themselves, and conse- 
quently that there are not recollections stored in the 
particular regions of the cerebral cortex which the 
malady has destroyed. The lesions really make the 
evoking of recollections impossible or difficult; they 
concern the mechanism of recall, and that mechanism 
only. More exactly, the function of the brain in thi9 
case is to give the mind, when it has need of a recol- 
lection, the power of obtaining from the body a 
certain attitude, or certain nascent movements, which 
offer to the recollection sought for an appropriate 
frame. If the frame be there, the recollection will 
come of its own accord to insert itself into it. The 
cerebral organ prepares the frame; it does not furnish 
the recollection. That is what the maladies of word- 
memory teach us, and it is also what the psychological 
analysis of memory in general would lead us to ex- 
pect. 

If we turn now to the other functions of thought, 
the hypothesis of a strict parallelism between the 
mental life and the cerebral life is not what the facts 
would naturally suggest to us. In the work of thought 
in general, as in the particular case of memory, the 
brain appears to be charged simply with the task of 
impressing on the body the movements and attitudes 



92 MIND-ENERGY 

which act what the mind thinks, or what the circum- 
stances invite it to think. I have expressed this by 
saying that the brain is an " organ of pantomime." 
Were any one able to look inside a brain in its full 
activity, to follow the going and coming of the atoms, 
and to interpret all they were doing, he would doubt- 
less know something of what was going on in the mind, 
but he would know very little. He would know only 
just what can be expressed in bodily gestures, attitudes 
and movements, — what the state of the soul might 
contain of action in course of accomplishment or simply 
nascent; the rest would escape him. As regards the 
thoughts and feelings which were being unrolled within 
the consciousness, he would be in the situation of a 
spectator seeing distinctly all that the actors were do- 
ing on the stage, but not hearing a word of what they 
were saying. Or yet again, he would be like a person 
who could only know a symphony by the movements of 
the conductor directing the orchestra. Indeed, the 
cerebral phenomena are to the mental life just what the 
gestures of the conductor are to the symphony: they 
mark out the motor articulations, they do nothing else. 
In other words, we should find nothing of the higher 
workings of the mind within the cerebral cortex. Ex- 
cept its sensory functions, the brain has no other part 
than to play, in the full meaning of the term, the mental 
life. 

I recognize, however, that this " pantomime " is 



11 PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING " 93 

of primary importance. It is by it that we insert 
ourselves in reality, that we adapt ourselves to it, that 
we respond to the call of circumstances by appropriate 
actions. If consciousness is not a function of the brain, 
at least the brain maintains consciousness fixed on the 
world in which we live ; it is the organ of attention to 
life. That is why a cerebral modification, even a slight 
one, — a passing intoxication by alcohol or opium, for 
example (all the more a lasting intoxication like those 
which are probably often the explanation of insanity) , 
may involve a complete perturbation of the mental life. 
It is not that the mind is directly affected. It is not 
necessary to believe, as it often is believed, that the 
poison has sought out a particular mechanism in the 
cerebral cortex which is the material aspect of a par- 
ticular reasoning, that it has deranged this mechanism, 
and that it is on that account that the patient raves. 
But the effect of the lesion is that the mechanism is 
thrown out of gear, and thought can no longer insert 
itself exactly in things. An insane person, suffering 
from the delusion that he is being persecuted, can still 
reason very logically; but his reasoning is out of line 
with reality, outside reality, — as we reason in a dream. 
To direct our thought towards action, to bring it to 
prepare the act that the circumstances call for, — it is 
for this that our brain is formed. 

But in doing this it canalizes, and also it limits, 
the mental life. It prevents us from turning our 



94 MIND-ENERGY 

eyes to right and left, and even, for most part of 
our time, behind; it would have us look right before 
US in the direction in which we have to go. Is this 
not already clear in the operation of the memory? 
Many facts seem to indicate that the past is preserved 
even down to its slightest details, and that there is no 
real forgetting. You have heard of persons resusci- 
tated from drowning or hanging, who have said that 
during a moment they had the panoramic vision of 
the totality of their past. Other examples show that 
asphyxia has nothing to do with the phenomenon, al- 
though it has been said that it has. It has occurred to 
Alpine climbers slipping on a precipice, to soldiers see- 
ing the guns fired at them and feeling themselves lost. 
The truth is that our whole past is always present be- 
hind us, and to perceive it we have but to look back; 
only, we cannot and we must not look back. We must 
not, because our end is to live, to act, and life and ac- 
tion look forward. We cannot, because the cerebral 
mechanism is fashioned to this end, — to mask from 
us the past, to let at each moment only so much pass 
through as will throw light on the present situation 
and favour our action : it is by this very obscuring 
of all our recollections, except only that which is of 
interest and which our body already outlines by its 
11 pantomime," that it recalls this useful recollection. 
Should, however, the attention to life grow weak for 
a moment (I do not mean voluntary attention, which 



" PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING " 95 

is momentary and individual, but that continuous at- 
tention common to us all, imposed by nature, which 
we may call " racial attention "), then our mind, which 
has of force been kept till then looking forward, loses 
the tension which strains it and by the recoil is made 
backward-looking; it surveys its whole history. The 
panoramic vision of the past is due, then, to a sudden 
disinterestedness in life born of the sudden conviction 
that the moment is the moment of death. Therefore, 
up to then the business of the brain, sd far as it is the 
organ of memory, has been to keep the attention fixed 
on life by usefully contracting the field of conscious- 
ness. 

But what I say of memory is equally true of 
perception. I will not enter here into details. It 
will be enough if I say that everything is obscure and 
even incomprehensible in perception if we regard the 
cerebral centres as organs capable of transforming 
material vibrations into conscious states; while, on the 
contrary, all becomes clear if we see in those centres 
(and in the sensory contrivances with which they are 
connected) instruments of selection charged with 
choosing, in the immense field of our virtual percep- 
tions, those which are to be actualized. Leibniz said 
that each monad, and therefore a fortiori each of those 
monads that he calls minds, carries in it the conscious 
or unconscious idea of the totality of the real. I should 
not go so far; but I think that we perceive virtually 



96 MIND-ENERGY 

many more things than we perceive actually, and that 
here, once more, the part that our body plays is that 
of shutting out from consciousness all that is of no 
practical interest to us, all that does not lend itself to 
our action. The sense organs, the sensory nerves, the 
cerebral centres canalize, then, the influences from 
without, and thus mark the various directions in which 
our own influence can be exercised. But in doing so 
they narrow our vision of the present, just as the 
cerebral mechanisms of memory shut out our vision 
of the past. Now, just as certain useless memories, 
or " dream " memories, may slip into the field of 
consciousness, availing themselves of a moment of 
inattention to life, may there not be around our normal 
perception a fringe of perceptions, most often uncon- 
scious, but all ready to enter into consciousness, and 
which do in fact enter in exceptional cases or in pre- 
disposed subjects? If there are perceptions of this 
kind, it is not only psychology in the strict meaning of 
the term that they concern; they are facts with which 
" psychical research " can and should concern itself. 

Let us not forget, moreover, that it is space which 
creates the sharp divisions. Our bodies are external 
to one another in space; and our minds, in so far as 
they are attached to those bodies, are separated by 
intervals. But if the mind is attached to the body only 
by a part of itself, we may conjecture that for the other 
part of the mind there is a reciprocal encroachment. 



" PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING " 97 

Between different minds there may be continually tak- 
ing place changes analogous to the phenomena of en- 
dosmosis. If such intercommunication exists, nature 
will have taken precautions to render it harmless, and 
most likely certain mechanisms are specially charged 
with the duty of throwing back, into the unconscious, 
images so introduced, for they would be very embar- 
rassing in everyday life. Now and then, however, one 
of these images might pass through as contraband, 
especially if the inhibiting mechanisms were function- 
ing badly; and with such a fact " psychical research " 
would be concerned. It may be that this is the way 
veridical hallucinations are produced and " phantasms 
of the living " arise. 

The more we become accustomed to this idea of 
a consciousness overflowing the organism, the more 
natural we find it to suppose that the soul survives 
the body. Were, indeed, the mental moulded exactly 
on the cerebral, were there nothing more in a human 
mind than what is inscribed in a human brain, we 
might have to admit that consciousness must share the 
fate of the body and die with it. But if the facts, 
studied without regard to any system, lead us, on the 
contrary, to regard the mental life as much more vast 
than the cerebral life, survival becomes so probable 
that the burden of proof comes to lie on him who 
denies it rather than on him who affirms it; for the 
one and only reason we can have for believing in an 



98 MIND-ENERGY 

extinction of consciousness after death is that wc see 
the body become disorganized; and this reason has 
no longer any value, if the independence of almost the 
totality of consciousness in regard to the body is also 
a fact of experience. 

Such, briefly stated, are the conclusions to which 
an impartial examination of the known facts leads me. 
That is to say, I regard the field open to psychical 
research as very vast, and even as unlimited. This 
new science will soon make up the time lost. Mathe- 
matics goes back to the ancient Greeks; physics has 
existed now for three or four hundred years ; chemistry 
arose in the eighteenth century; biology is nearly as 
old; but psychology dates from yesterday, and 
psychical research is almost of today. Must we re- 
gret the time lost? I have sometimes asked myself 
what would have happened if modern science, instead 
of setting out from mathematics to turn its direction 
towards mechancis, physics and chemistry, instead of 
bringing all its forces to converge on the study of 
matter, had begun by the consideration of mind — if 
Kepler, Galileo and Newton, for example, had been 
psychologists. They would have produced a psy- 
chology of which today we can form no idea, just as 
before Galileo no one could have imagined what our 
physics would be, — a psychology which probably 
would have been to our present psychology what our 
physics is to that of Aristotle. Foreign to every 



" PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING " 99 

mechanistic idea, science would have studied eagerly, 
instead of dismissing a priori, phenomena such as 
those you study; perhaps " psychical research " would 
have stood out as its principal preoccupation. The 
most general laws of mental activity once discovered 
(as, in fact, the fundamental principles of mechanics 
were discovered) , science would have passed from pure 
mind to life: biology would have been constituted, 
but a vitalist biology, quite different from ours, which 
would have sought, behind the sensible forms of living 
beings, the inward, invisible force of which the sensible 
forms are the manifestations. On this force we have 
today taken no hold, just because our science of mind 
is still in its infancy; and this is why men of science 
are not wrong when they reproach vitalism with being 
a sterile doctrine: it is sterile today, it will not be 
so always, and it would not have been so now had 
modern science at its origin taken things at the other 
end. Together with this vitalist biology there would 
have arisen a medical practice which would have sought 
to remedy directly the insufficiencies of the vital force ; 
it would have aimed at the cause and not at the effects, 
at the centre instead of at the periphery; healing by 
suggestion or, more generally, by the influence of 
mind on mind might have taken forms and propor- 
tions of which it is impossible for us to form the least 
idea. So would have been founded, so would have 
been developed, the science of mind-energy. But 



ioo MIND-ENERGY 

when this science, following the manifestations of mind 
step by step from higher to lower, passing life and 
organization, had come at last to inert matter, it 
would then have stopped abruptly, surprised and 
dismayed. It would have tried to apply its accus- 
tomed methods to this new object, and it would have 
obtained no hold on it, just as today the processes 
of calculation and measurement have no hold on the 
things of the mind. It is matter, and not mind, which 
in this case would have been the realm of mystery. 
Suppose, then, that in an unknown land — let us say 
America, but an America not yet discovered by 
Europe and bent on having nothing to do with us — 
there had been developed a science identical with our 
actual science, with all its mechanical applications. It 
might then have happened that from time to time some 
fishermen, venturing far out from the coast of Ireland 
or Brittany, would have seen, far off on the horizon, 
an American ship moving at full speed against the wind 
— a steamship, let us say. They would have come and 
told what they had seen. Would they have been be- 
lieved? Probably not. They would have been mis- 
trusted just in proportion as those to whom they told 
the tale were educated and thereby imbued with a 
science which would have been psychical in direction, the 
reverse of physics and mechanics. And it would have 
been necessary to constitute a Society like yours — but, 
in this case, a Society for physical research — which 



"PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING " 101 

would have called witnesses before it, judged and 
criticized their tales, and established the authenticity 
of the " apparitions " of steamboats. However, as 
this Society would have been able for the moment to 
use only the historical or critical method, it would not 
have been able to overcome the scepticism of those who 
would have challenged it — since it believed in the ex- 
istence of these miraculous boats — to construct one 
and make it work. 

This is a dream I indulge in at times, but it is only a 
dream. I wake from it saying, — No, it was neither 
possible nor desirable that the human mind should 
have followed such direction. It was not possible, be- 
cause mathematical science was already in existence at 
the dawn of the modern era, and it was therefore nec- 
essary to begin by drawing from it what it had to give 
for our knowledge of the world in which we live. We 
do not let go the prey to grasp what may be only a 
shadow. But, even supposing it had been possible, 
it was not desirable, for psychical science itself, that 
the human mind should have applied itself first of 
all to it. For though, without doubt, had there 
been expended on psychical science the amount of 
work, of talent and of genius, which has been con- 
secrated to the sciences of matter, the knowledge of 
mind would have been pushed very far, yet something 
would have been always lacking, something of inestima- 
ble price and without which all the rest would lose 



102 MIND-ENERGY 

much of its value, — the precision, the exactness, the 
anxiety for proof, the habit of distinguishing between 
what is simply possible or probable and what is cer- 
tain. Do not think that these are qualities natural to 
intelligence. Humanity did without them for a very 
long time ; they would perhaps never have appeared in 
the world at all had there not existed formerly a small 
people, in a corner of Greece, for whom nearly so was 
not enough, and who invented precision. Mathemati- 
cal proof — that creation of the Greek genius — was 
it here the effect or the cause? I do not know; but 
undoubtedly it is by mathematics that the need of proof 
has been passed on from intellect to intellect, taking so 
much the more room in the human mind as mathemati- 
cal science, by means of mechanics, embraced a greater 
number of the phenomena of matter. The habit of 
bringing to the study of concrete reality the same re- 
quirements of precision, of exactness, of certitude, 
which are characteristic of the mathematical mind is, 
therefore, a habit we owe to the sciences of matter and 
that we should not have had without them. There- 
fore science, had it been applied in the first instance 
to the things of mind, would probably have remained 
uncertain and vague, however far it might have ad- 
vanced; it would, perhaps, never have distinguished 
between what is simply plausible and what must be 
definitely accepted. But today that, thanks to the 
sciences of matter, we know how to make the distinc- 



« PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING " 103 

tion and possess the qualities it implies, we can adven- 
ture without fear into the scarcely explored domain of 
psychical realities. Let us advance therein with cau- 
tion and yet with boldness, let us also cast off the bad 
metaphysics which cramps our movements, and the 
science of mind may yield results surpassing our hopes. 



IV 

DREAMS 
A Lecture at the " Institut Psychologique" March 20, 1 901. 

The subject I am to discuss is so complex, and touches 
so many problems, — psychological, physiological and 
metaphysical, — that to treat it in a complete manner 
would require a long development. I will therefore 
dispense with all preamble, set aside unessentials, and 
go at once to the heart of the question. 

Here, then, am I, dreaming. Objects are seen to 
be coming and going, yet there are none of them. 
I seem to be walking, acting, meeting all kinds of ad- 
ventures, yet I am lying all the time perfectly still 
in bed. I hear myself speak, and understand the an- 
swers I receive, yet all the time I am quite alone and 
silent. Whence comes the illusion? Why am I per- 
ceiving persons and things when nobody and nothing 
is there? 

First, however, let us ask, — Is there nothing at all? 
Is there not some actual material offered to the organs 
of sight, touch, hearing, etc., during sleep as well as 
when we are awake ? 

Let us close our eyes and see what is going on. 

104 



DREAMS 105 

Most people would say there is nothing going on. 
That is because they are not carefully attending. 
First, there is a black background. Then appear 
colour blotches, sometimes dull, sometimes of singular 
brilliancy. These spots spread and shrink, changing 
form and tone, constantly shifting. The change may 
be slow and gradual, or it may be extremely rapid. 
Whence comes this phantasmagoria? Physiologists 
and psychologists have described it as " light-dust,'* 
" ocular spectra," " phosphenes." They attribute the 
appearances to the slight modifications which are cease- 
lessly taking place in the circulation of blood in the 
retina, or to the pressure which the closed lid exerts 
upon the eyeball, causing a mechanical excitation of the 
optic nerve. But the explanation of the phenomena 
and the name we give them matter little. The ap- 
pearances are common experience and they are no 
doubt " such stuff as dreams are made of." 

Thirty or forty years ago, M. Alfred Maury and, 
about the same time, the Marquis of Hervey of St. 
Denis, observed that these colour blotches of fluid 
appearance may solidify at the moment of falling 
asleep, thus shaping the objects which are going to 
compose the dream. But the observation was open 
to suspicion, as it was the work of psychologists who 
were almost asleep. More recently, an American 
psychologist, Professor Ladd, of Yale, devised a more 
rigorous method, but difficult to apply, because it re- 



to6 MIND-ENERGY 

quire* a sort of training. It consists in keeping the 
eyes closed on awaking, and retaining for some mo- 
ments the dream about to take flight — flight from 
the field of vision and also, probably, from that of 
memory. At that moment we may see the objects of 
the dream dissolve into phosphenes, become melted 
into the coloured spots which the eye really perceived 
when the lids were closed. We are reading, let us 
say, a newspaper; that is the dream. We wake up, 
and of the newspaper with its printed lines there is now 
a white spot with vague black rays ; that is the reality. 
Or the dream is carrying us through the open sea — 
all around us the ocean spreads its grey waves crowned 
with white foam. We awake, and all is lost in a 
blotch of pale grey, sown with brilliant points. The 
blotch was there, the brilliant points were there too. 
There was therefore, present to our perception during 
our sleep, a light-dust and this dust served for the 
fabrication of the dream. 

Did this alone suffice? Confining attention to the 
sense of sight, let us add that besides these visual sensa- 
tions, the source of which is internal, there are some 
which have an external cause. The eyelids may be 
closed, but the eyes can still distinguish light from 
shade, and even, to a certain extent, recognize the na- 
ture of the light. The sensations evoked by the 
stimulus of a real light are the origin of many dreams. 
A candle suddenly lighted may evoke in a sleeper, if 



ELREAMS 107 

his slumber is not too deep, a group of visions domi- 
nated by the idea of fire. Tissie recounts two in- 
stances of it: " B. dreams that the theatre of 
Alexandria is on fire; the flame lights up the whole 
place. All of a sudden he is transported to the 
fountain in the public square ; a line of fire is running 
along the chains which connect the great posts placed 
round the basin. Now he is back in Paris at the 
Exhibition, which is on fire. He is taking part in ter- 
rible scenes, etc. He wakes up with a start. His 
eyes were catching the beam of light thrown by the 
dark lantern which the hospital nurse going her round 
had flashed toward his bed in passing. . . . M. dreams 
that he is in the navy, in which he has formerly served. 
He is going to Fort-de-France, to Toulon, to Lorient, 
to the Crimea, to Constantinople. He sees lightning, 
he hears thunder, now there is a battle going on in 
which he sees fire belching from the cannon. He 
wakes up with a start. Like B., what has wakened 
him is the beam of light from the dark lantern of the 
hospital nurse." Such are the dreams which a bright 
and sudden light may provoke. 

Quite different arc the dreams suggested by a soft 
and continuous light, like that of the moon. Krauss 
relates that one night, waking up, he was holding out 
his arms towards what in his dream had been a maiden, 
but was now the moon, the full light of which was 
falling on him. The case is not singular. It seems 



108 MIND-ENERGY 

that the rays of the moon, caressing the eyes of the 
sleeper, have the virtue of arousing virginal appari- 
tions. May not this be the interpretation of the fable 
of Endymion, the shepherd lapped in perpetual slum- 
ber, whom the goddess Selene (that is, the moon), 
loves with a deep love ? 

The ear, too, has its internal sensations — buzzing, 
tinkling, whistling — which we hardly feel while 
awake, but may clearly distinguish in sleep. There 
are also some external sounds which we may continue 
to hear after we have fallen asleep. The creaking 
of furniture, the crackling of the fire, the rain beating 
against the window, the wind playing its chromatic 
scale in the chimney, such are some of the sounds 
which still strike the ear and which the dream may 
turn into conversation, cries, music, etc. Scissors are 
rubbed against the tongs in Alfred Maury's ears while 
he is asleep: at once he dreams that he hears the 
tocsin and is taking part in the events of June 1848. 
I could give many other examples. Sounds, however, 
do not hold so great a place in most dreams as shapes 
and colours. Our dreams are mainly visual. Often, 
indeed, we are only seeing, when we believe ourselves 
to be also hearing. M. Max Simon observes that 
sometimes it happens we are dreaming that we are 
engaged in a conversation, and then suddenly we be- 
come aware that no one is speaking and that no one 
has spoken: between our interlocutor and ourself a 



DREAMS 109 

direct exchange of thought was going on, a silent con- 
versation. A strange phenomenon, yet easy to ex- 
plain. To hear sounds in a dream, it is generally 
necessary that real sounds should be perceived. Out 
of nothing the dream can make nothing. And when 
it is not provided with sound material, a dream would 
find it hard to manufacture sound. 

Touch also intervenes as well as hearing. A con- 
tact, a pressure, may reach consciousness even during 
sleep. Tactile sensations, permeating with their in- 
fluence the images in the visual field, can modify their 
form and their meaning. Suppose, in our sleep, the 
contact of the body with the night-dress reaches con- 
sciousness: the sleeper will dream that he is lightly 
clad. Then, if his dream is at the moment taking him 
through the street, it is in this simple attire that he 
presents himself to the gaze of the passers-by — with- 
out, however, their being shocked; for it is rare that 
the eccentricities we exhibit in dreams seem to astonish 
the people whom we then see around us, although we 
may feel ashamed of them ourselves. I have instanced 
this dream because it is frequent. There is another 
which many of us must have experienced. It consists 
in feeling oneself flying, floating, moving through 
space without touching ground. This dream, when 
once it has occurred, tends to reproduce itself, and at 
each new experience of it we seem to be saying: " I 
have often dreamed that I was moving without touch- 



no MIND-ENERGY 

ing the ground, but this time I am doing it while awake. 
I now know, and am indeed proving to other people, 
that we may free ourselves from the law of gravita- 
tion. " If you wake up suddenly, this is what you 
probably find. You feel that your feet have lost con- 
tact with the ground, and this is so, for you are in 
fact lying extended in your bed; on the other hand, 
believing you are not asleep, you do not realize that 
you are in bed. Therefore you must be standing up, 
and yet you cannot be touching the ground. Such is 
the idea which your dream is evolving. Observe also 
that when you feel you are flying, you believe you are 
thrusting your body forward on the right side or the 
left by raising and flapping your arm with a sudden 
movement, as though you were spreading out a wing. 
Now, this is just the side on which you happen to be 
lying. Wake up and you will find that the sensation 
of effort for flight coincides with the real sensation 
given you by the pressure of your arm and of your 
body against the bed. Detached from its cause, it was 
no more than a vague sensation of fatigue, which 
could be ascribed to any kind of effo/t; attached by 
you, now, to the belief that your body has risen from 
the ground, it becomes the definite sensation of an effort 
to fly. 

It is interesting to see how these sensations of pres- 
sure, mounting up to the visual field and taking ad- 
vantage of the light-dust which fills it, can be trans- 



DREAMS in 

formed into shapes and colours. Max Simon once 
dreamt that he had before him two heaps of gold 
coins: they were of unequal height, and he tried to 
equalize them. He did not succeed. He experienced 
a feeling of extreme anguish. This feeling, growing 
moment by moment, ended by awakening him. He 
then perceived that one of his legs was caught by the 
folds of the bedclothes, that his two feet were not on 
the same level and were trying in vain to get together. 
Hence a vague sensation of inequality, which, making 
an irruption into the visual field and perhaps encounter- 
ing there (such, at least, is the hypothesis which I pro- 
pose) one or more yellow blotches, had expressed itself 
visually by the inequality of two heaps of gold coins. 
There is, then, immanent in the tactile sensations dur- 
ing sleep, a tendency for them to visualize themselves 
and be inserted in this form in the dream. 

More important still are the sensations of il internal 
touch," emanating from all points of the organism 
and, more particularly, from the viscera. Sleep may 
give them, or rather restore in them, a high degree of 
sharpness and acuity. They are there just the same, 
no doubt, when we are awake, but we are then turned 
away from them by action, living, as it were, outside 
ourselves. Sleep brings us back within ourselves. It 
happens sometimes that persons subject to laryngitis, 
amygdalitis, etc., feel in their dream a return of their 
complaint, and experience a disagreeable tingling in 



ii2 MIND-ENERGY 

the throat. Only an illusion, they say to themselves 
on waking. Alas! the illusion very soon becomes 
reality. There are cases of serious maladies and dis- 
orders, epileptic fits, heart disease, etc., which have 
been foreseen in this way, foretold in dream. No 
wonder, then, that philosophers like Schopenhauer 
make the dream translate to consciousness perturba- 
tions emanating from the sympathetic nervous system; 
that psychologists like Schemer attribute to each of 
our organs the power of provoking specific dreams 
which represent it symbolically; and that physicians 
like Artigues have written treatises on " the semeio- 
logical value " of the dream — that is, on the method 
of using dreams in the diagnosis of disease. More 
recently, Tissie has shown how disorders of digestion, 
breathing and circulation, manifest themselves in defi- 
nite kinds of dream. 

To sum up, then, in natural sleep our senses are 
by no means closed to external impressions. No 
doubt, they no longer have the same precision, but in 
compensation they are open to many " subjective " 
impressions which pass unperceived during waking, 
when we are moving in an external world common to 
all men, and which reappear in sleep, because we are 
then living only for ourselves. We cannot even say 
that our perception is narrowed when we are sleeping; 
if anything it extends, at least in certain directions, its 
field of operation. It is true that it loses in tension 



DREAMS 113 

what it gains in extension. It brings hardly anything 
but what is diffused and confused. None the less, it 
is out of real sensation that we fabricate the dream. 

How do we fabricate it? The sensations which 
serve as material are vague and indefinite. Let us 
take those which figure on the first plane, the coloured 
blotches which float before us when we have closed 
our eyes. Here are some black lines upon a white 
background. They can represent a carpet, a chess- 
board, a printed page, or a host of other things. Who 
will choose ? What is the form which will imprint its 
decision upon the indecision of the material? The 
form is memory. 

Let us note first that the dream does not generally 
create anything. Doubtless there may be cited some 
examples of artistic, literary and scientific work 
executed in the course of a dream. I recall the one 
which is the best known of all. Tartini, a musician 
of the eighteenth century, was toiling at a composition, 
but the muse was rebellious. He fell asleep. The 
devil then appeared in person, seized the violin and 
played the sonata. Tartini wrote it from memory 
when he awoke. It is now known to us as " The 
Devil's Sonata." But we can deduce no conclusion 
from so summary an anecdote. We should want 
to make sure that Tartini did not bring the sonata to 
a definite shape while he was trying to remember it. 
The imagination of the dreamer who awakes adds 



ii 4 MIND-ENERGY 

sometimes to the dream, modifies it retrospectively and 
fills in the lacunae, which may be many. I have tried 
to find more detailed observation and unquestionable 
authenticity. I can cite no better case than that of 
Robert Louis Stevenson. In a curious essay entitled 
" A Chapter on Dreams," he informs us that many 
of his stories, and these the most original, were com- 
posed, or at least sketched, in dream. But read the 
chapter carefully, and you will see that during part of 
his life he lived in a psychical condition in which it was 
very hard to know whether he was asleep or awake. I 
believe, indeed, that when mind is creating, when it is 
giving the effort which the composition of a work of art 
or the solution of a problem requires, it is not actually 
asleep. I mean that the part of the mind which is 
working is not the same as that which is dreaming: the 
working part is pursuing its task in the subconscious; 
this task is without influence on the dream and only 
manifested at the awaking. As to the dream itself, it 
is little else than a resurrection of the past. But it is 
a past we sometimes fail to recognize. Often it has to 
do with a forgotten circumstance, with a remembrance 
which had apparently disappeared, which in reality lay 
concealed in the depths of memory. Often, too, the 
image evoked is that of an object or fact which we 
have perceived distractedly, almost unconsciously, while 
awake. Or it may be made up of fragments of broken 
memories, picked up here and there, presented to the 



DREAMS 115 

consciousness of the dreamer in an incoherent form. 
To this heterogeneous assemblage of meaningless frag- 
ments the intellect (which, contrary to what has been 
said, continues to reason) seeks to give a meaning. It 
attributes the incoherence to lacunae which it endeav- 
ours to fill by evoking other memories, and these, being 
often presented in the same disorder, call for a new 
explanation in their turn, and so on indefinitely. But 
I do not insist upon this point for the moment. It is 
sufficient for me to say, in order to answer the question 
I have propounded, that the power which gives form to 
the materials furnished to the dream by the different 
senses, the power which converts into precise, definite 
objects the vague impressions received by the eyes, 
the ears and the whole surface and interior of the 
body, is memory. 

Memory! In the waking state we have indeed 
memories which appear and disappear, occupying our 
mind in turn. But they are memories which are 
closely connected with our situation and our action. 
I recall at this moment the book of the Marquis of 
Hervey on dreams. That is because I am discussing 
the problem of the dream, and because I am lecturing 
to the Psychological Institute. My surroundings and 
my occupation, what I perceive and what I have to do, 
are giving a particular orientation to the activity of my 
memory. The memories that we evoke while in our 
waking state, however remote they may often appear 



n6 MIND-ENERGY 

from our preoccupations of the moment, are always 
attached to some aspect of them. What is the role 
of memory in the animal? It is to recall to it, in each 
circumstance, the advantageous or injurious conse- 
quences which have followed under analogous condi- 
tions, and so teach it what it ought to do. In man, I 
admit, memory is less the slave of action, yet it ad- 
heres closely to it. Our memories, at a given moment, 
form one solidary whole, a pyramid whose point 
coincides with our present, — with a present moving 
ceaselessly and plunging into the future. But, behind 
the memories which crowd in upon our present occupa- 
tion and are revealed by means of it, there are others, 
thousands on thousands of others, below and beneath 
the scene illuminated by consciousness. Yes, I believe 
our past life is there, preserved even to the minutest 
details; nothing is forgotten; all we have perceived, 
thought, willed, from the first awakening of our con- 
sciousness, persists indefinitely. But the memories 
which are preserved in these obscure depths are for 
us in the state of invisible phantoms. They aspire, 
perhaps, to the light: they do not even try to rise to 
it; they know it is impossible, and that I, a living and 
acting being, have something else to do than occupy 
myself with them. But suppose that, at a given mo- 
ment, I become disinterested in the present situation, 
in the pressing action, in both of the forces which con- 
centrate on one single point all the activities of mem- 



DREAMS 117 

ory; suppose, in other words, I fall asleep: then these 
repressed memories, feeling that I have set aside the 
obstacle, raised the trap-door which held them back 
below the floor of consciousness, begin to stir. They 
rise and spread abroad and perform in the night of the 
unconscious a wild phantasmagoric dance. They rush 
together to the door which has been left ajar. They 
all want to get through. But they cannot; there are 
too many of them. Of the many called, which will be 
chosen ? It is easy to guess. Just now, when awake, 
the memories admitted were those which could claim 
relationship with my present situation, with my actual 
perceptions. Now, more fleeting are the forms which 
stand out before my eyes, more indecisive the sounds 
which affect my ears, more indistinct the touch impres- 
sions distributed over the surface of my body; — but 
more numerous, now, are the sensations coming to me 
from within my organs. So, then, among the phantom 
memories which aspire to weight themselves with 
colour, with sound, in short with materiality, those 
only succeed which can assimilate the colour-dust I 
perceive, the noises without and within that I hear, 
etc., and which, besides, are in harmony with the gen- 
eral affective state which my organic impressions com- 
pose. When this union between memory and sersation 
is effected, I dream. 

In a poetic page of the Enneades, Plotinus explains 
to us how men are born to life. Nature, he says, 



n8 MIND-ENERGY 

sketches living bodies, but only sketches them. Left 
to her own forces alone, she could not complete the 
picture. On the other hand, souls dwell in the world 
of the Ideas. Incapable of acting, and moreover not 
even thinking of acting, they lie at rest above time 
and outside space. But, among bodies, there are some 
which by their form respond more than others to the 
aspirations of certain souls. And, among souls, there 
are some which find their own likeness, so to say, in 
certain bodies. The body, unfinished, as it has been 
left by nature, rises towards the soul which can give it 
complete life. And the soul, looking down on the body 
and perceiving it as the reflexion of itself in a mirror, 
is fascinated, leans forward and falls. This fall is 
the beginning of life. I may liken these detached souls 
to the memories lying in wait in the depth of the 
unconscious, and the bodies to our sensations during 
sleep. Sensation is warm, coloured, vibrant and al- 
most living, but vague; memory is clear and distinct, 
but without substance and lifeless. Sensation longs 
for a form into which to solidify its fluidity; memory 
longs for matter to fill it, to ballast it, in short, to 
realize it. They are drawn towards each other; and 
the phantom memory, materializing itself in sensation 
which brings it flesh and blood, becomes a being which 
lives a life of its own, a dream. 

The birth of the dream, then, is no mystery. In- 
deed, a dream is elaborated almost in the same way as 



DREAMS 119 

a perception of the real world. The mechanism of the 
operation is the same in its main lines. For what we 
see of an object placed before our eyes, what we hear 
of a sentence pronounced in our ear, is trifling in com* 
parison to what our memory adds to it. When we 
read a book or glance through the newspaper, do we 
actually perceive each letter of each word or even 
each word of each sentence? Were it so, we should 
not read many pages. The fact is that we only 
actually see, in a word and in a sentence, a few letters, 
or even a few characteristic strokes, just what is needed 
in order that we can guess all the remainder: as for 
that remainder, we fancy we are seeing it, but we are 
actually producing in ourselves the hallucination of it. 
There are numerous and decisive experiments which 
leave no doubt on this point. I will cite only those of 
Goldscheider and Miiller. The experiments consisted 
in writing or printing ordinary notices such as " No 
admission," " Preface to the fourth edition,*' etc., and 
purposely making mistakes, changing and above all 
omitting letters. The notices were posted, one at a 
time, in the dark before the subject of the experiment, 
who, of course, was ignorant of what had been written. 
Then light was flashed on the notice for a very short 
time, too short for the observer actually to see all the 
letters. They began by finding experimentally the 
minimum time required to perceive a single letter of 
the alphabet : it was then easy to adapt the illumination 



120 MIND-ENERGY 

so that the observer should not have time to distinguish 
more than eight or ten letters of the thirty or forty in 
the notice. Now he usually read the notice without 
difficulty. But this is not the most instructive point in 
the experiment. If the observer was asked what let- 
ters he was sure of having seen, he would sometimes 
name, of course, some of the letters really present, but 
he would just as well name letters that were absent, — 
whether simply omitted or replaced by others. So, 
because the meaning appeared to require it, he had seen 
standing out in full light non-existent letters. The 
characters actually perceived had therefore served to 
evoke a remembrance. The unconscious memory, dis- 
covering the notice to which they gave a start towards 
realization, had projected that remembrance outward 
in the form of hallucination. It is this remembrance 
which the observer had seen, as much and more than 
the actual inscription. In short, rapid reading is a 
work of divination, but not of abstract divination: it 
is an externalization of memories, of perceptions 
simply remembered and consequently unreal, which 
profit by the partial realization that they find here and 
there in order to be realized integrally. 

Thus, in the waking state, the knowledge we seize 
of an object implies an analogous operation to that 
which is accomplished in dream. We perceive only of 
the thing a mere sketch; this flashes an appeal to the 



DREAMS 121 

memory of the complete thing; and the complete mem- 
ory, of which our mind is unconscious, or in any case is 
only conscious of as a thought, profits by the occasion 
to spring out. It is this kind of hallucination, inserted 
and fitted into a real frame, which we provide for our- 
selves when we perceive things. There are, besides, 
many interesting observations which concern the con- 
duct and attitude of the memory-images during this 
operation. Images, however deep and far back in our 
memory, are not inert and indifferent. They are ac- 
tive and ready; they are almost attentive. If, for 
example, with my mind pre-occupied, I open the news- 
paper, I may at once drop on some word which exactly 
responds to my preoccupation. But lo! the sentence 
has no meaning, and I soon discover that the word read 
is not the word printed; it had simply some features in 
common with it, a vague resemblance of form. The 
idea which was absorbing me must therefore have 
aroused in the unconscious all the images of the same 
family, all the recollections of corresponding words, 
and given them hope, so to say, of a return to conscious- 
ness. One only has effectively come to consciousness, 
namely, that which the actual perception of a certain 
form of word had already begun to realize. 

Such is the mechanism of true perception, and such 
is that of the dream. In both cases there are, on the 
one hand, real impressions made on the organs of 



122 MIND-ENERGY 

sense, and on the other, memories which encase them- 
selves in the impression and profit by its vitality to 
return to life. 

What, then, is the difference between perceiving and 
dreaming? What is sleep? I am not concerned, of 
course, with its physiological conditions. This is the 
business of physiologists; it is far from being settled. 
I am inquiring how we are to represent the sleeping 
person's state of soul. For the mind continues to 
function during sleep; it exercises itself, as we have 
just seen, on sensations and memories ; and in the sleep- 
ing as in the waking state it combines the sensation 
with the memory which the sensation evokes. Yet we 
have, on the one hand, normal perception, and on the 
other, dream. The mechanism, therefore, does not 
work in the same way in each. What is the difference ? 
What are the psychological characteristics of the 
sleeping state ? 

We must distrust theories. Some tell us that sleep 
consists in being isolated from the external world. 
But we have seen that sleep does not close our senses 
to external impressions, and that these impressions 
provide the materials of most of our dreams. Others, 
again, tell us tht in sleep the higher functions of 
thought are reposing, that there is a suspension of 
reasoning. I do not think this is any more exact. In 
the dream we often become indifferent to logic, but 
not incapable of logic. I will even venture to say, at 



DREAMS 123 

the risk of seeming paradoxical, that what is wrong 
with the dreamer is rather that he reasons too much. 
He would avoid absurdity, were he content to be a 
simple spectator at the procession of his dream images. 
But when he ventures to give an explanation, his logic, 
required to bind together incoherent images, can only 
parody reason and verge on the absurd. I acknowl- 
edge, however, that the higher intellectual faculties are 
relaxed during sleep, and that, even if the reasoning 
faculty is not encouraged that way by the incoherent 
play of the images, it may sometimes indulge in coun- 
terfeiting normal reasoning. But one might say as 
much of all the other faculties. It is, then, not by the 
abolition of reasoning, any more than by the closing 
of the senses, that we must characterize dreaming. 
Let us leave theory and come to fact. 

A decisive experiment must be made by introspec- 
tion. On coming out of a dream, — since we cannot 
analyse the dream while we are dreaming, — we must 
watch the transition from sleeping to waking, follow 
upon it as closely as possible: attentive to what is 
essentially inattention, we shall spy out, from the point 
of view of one who is already awake, the yet present 
state of one who sleeps. It is difficult, but not impos- 
sible to any one who has been patiently preparing for 
it. Let me then recount one of my dreams and what 
I believe I perceived on awaking. 

I dream that I am on a platform, addressing an as- 



i2 4 MIND-ENERGY 

sembly. A confused murmur arises at the back of the 
auditorium. It increases. It becomes a muttering, a 
roar, a frightful tumult. At length there resounds 
from all parts, bursting out in regular rhythm, the cry, 
— Out ! Out ! At this moment I become suddenly 
awake. A dog is barking in a neighbouring garden, 
and with each Wow ! Wow ! of the dog the cry Out ! 
Out! seems to be identical. This is the moment to 
seize. The waking self, which has suddenly reap- 
peared, turning to the dream-self, which is still there, 
pounces upon it and says: " Caught in the very act! 
You show me a shouting crowd and there is only a 
barking dog. Do not think you can escape. I shall 
not let go until you reveal your secret, and let me see 
exactly what it is you were doing! " To which the 
dream-self replies: "Simply use your eyes. Look! 
/ was doing nothing, and there is no other difference 
between you and me. You imagine that to hear a dog 
barking, and to know that it is a dog that barks, you 
have nothing to do? Profound mistake! You are 
making, without suspecting it, a big effort. You are 
taking your whole memory, all your accumulated ex- 
perience, and by a sudden compression bringing it to 
converge on the sound you hear at the one single point 
of the memory which most resembles the sensation 
and can best interpret it. The sensation is then exactly 
covered by the memory. You must obtain perfect 



DREAMS 125 

coincidence, there must not be the slightest overlapping 
of sensation or memory (if there be, you have pre- 
cisely the condition of dream) . This adjustment you 
can only secure by an attention or rather by a simultan- 
eous tension of sensation and memory, fitting the one 
to the other as the tailor fits on and tightens a new 
garment. Your life in the waking state is, then, 
a life of toil, even when you suppose you are doing 
nothing, for at every moment you must choose and 
at every moment you have to exclude. You choose 
among your sensations, since you reject from con- 
sciousness a host of " subjective " sensations which 
reappear when you sleep. You choose among your 
memories, since you reject every recollection which 
does not mould itself on your present state. This 
choice which you are continually accomplishing, this 
adaptation ceaselessly renewed, is the essential con- 
dition of what you call common sense. But such 
adaptation and choice keeps you in a state of unin- 
terrupted tension. You take no account of it at the 
time, any more than you feel the weight of the at- 
mosphere. But it fatigues you in the long run. Com- 
mon sense is very fatiguing. 

" Now, let me repeat it, I differ from you preciesly 
in that I do nothing. The effort you are called on 
to make without cessation, I simply abstain from. 
You are attached to life, I am detached from it. 



126 MIND-ENERGY 

Everything is indifferent to me. I am disinterested in 
everything. 1 To sleep is to be disinterested. We 
sleep to the exact extent to which we are disinterested. 
A mother asleep by the side of her child will not 
hear the thunder, but the child's sob will wake her. 
Is she, then, really asleep in regard to her child? We 
do not sleep in regard to anything which continues to 
interest us. 

" You ask me what I do when I dream? Let me 
tell you what you do when you wake. I, your dream- 
self, am the totality of your past — you take me and 
bring me, from contraction to contraction, to shut my- 
self into the very small circle you trace around your 
present action. This is being awake, this is living 
the normal psychical life, and this is striving and 
willing. As to dreaming, need I explain it? It is 
the state into which you naturally fall when you let 
yourself go, when you no longer care to concentrate 
yourself on a single point, when you cease to will. 
If you still insist and require explanation, ask how 
your will contrives, at every moment of waking life, 
to obtain instantaneously and almost unconsciously the 
concentration of all that you have within you on the 

1 The idea put forward here has made way since it was first pro- 
posed in the lecture. The concept of sleep-disinterestedness has found 
a place in psychology. The word " desinteret " is now used to denote 
the general state of the sleeper's consciousness. M. Claparede has 
founded a rery interesting theory on the concept. He regards sleep 
as a means of defence for the organism, a kind of instinct. 



DREAMS 127 

one point which interests you. But address your in- 
quiry to the psychology of waking. Its main function 
is to reply to you, for waking and willing are one and 
the same." 

This is what the dream-self would say. It might 
tell us much more would we let it. But I must con- 
clude. What is then the essential difference between 
being in a dream and being awake? I will sum it up 
by saying that the same faculties are being exercised 
whether we are awake or dreaming, but they are in 
tension in the one case, and relaxed in the other. The 
dream is the entire mental life, minus the effort of 
concentration. We still perceive, still remember, still 
reason. Perceptions, memories, reasonings may 
abound in a dreamer, for abundance, in the mental 
domain, does not mean effort. What requires effort 
is the precision of adjustment. For the barking of a 
dog, while it is going on, to detach from my memory 
the recollection of an uproarious assembly simply be- 
cause that recollection happens to be on its way, I 
need not do anything. But that the barking should 
go and choose, in preference to all recollections, the 
recollection of a bark, and thereupon, coalescing with 
it, be interpreted, — I mean, actually perceived as a 
bark, — requires a positive effort. The dreamer has 
no longer the force to make it. This, and this alone, 
distinguishes him from the man who is awake. 

Such is the difference. It is expressed in many 



128 MIND-ENERGY 

forms. I will not enter into detail, but will limit my- 
self to drawing your attention to three points, viz., 
the instability of the dream, the rapidity with which it 
can pass, and the preference it shows for insignificant 
recollections. 

The instability is easily explained. The essence of 
the dream being not to adjust the sensation with pre- 
cision to the memory but to allow some play between 
them, very different memories will suit equally well 
the same dream sensation. Suppose, for example, 
there is in the field of vision a green blotch strewn 
with white points. It is able to materialize the recol- 
lection of a daisied lawn, a billiard-table with its balls, 
and any number of other things besides. All these 
will therefore be striving to live again in the sensation, 
all will be in the chase. Sometimes they reach it one 
after another; the lawn becomes a billiard-table, and 
we are present at extraordinary transformations. 
Sometimes they reach it all together; then the lawn is 
a billiard-table, — an absurdity which the dreamer will 
try to get rid of by a reasoning which will only ag- 
gravate it. 

The rapidity with which some dreams unroll 
themselves appears to me to be another effect of the 
same cause. In a few seconds a dream can present 
to us a series of events which would occupy, in the 
waking state, entire days. The classical instance 
given by Alfred Maury is well known : "I am in 



DREAMS 129 

bed in my room, my mother at my pillow. I am 
dreaming of the Terror; I am present at scenes of 
massacre, I appear before the Revolution Tribunal, 
I see Robespierre, Marat, Fouquier-Tinville . . . ; 
I defend myself; I am convicted, condemned to death, 
driven in the tumbril to the Place de la Revolu- 
tion; I ascend the scaffold; the executioner lays me 
on the fatal plank, tilts it forward, the knife falls; I 
feel my head separate from my body, I wake in a 
state of intense anguish, and I feel on my neck the 
curtain pole which has suddenly got detached and 
fallen on my cervical vertibrae, just like a guillotine 
knife. It had all taken place in an instant, as my 
mother bore witness; and yet it was that external 
sensation which I had taken for the departure point 
of a dream in which so many facts succeeded one 
after another 1 ' (Maury, Le Sommeil et les Reves, 
fourth edition, p. 161). Whatever view be held by 
one or two psychologists of the literal accuracy of 
the fact, I regard it as probable, for I find analogous 
descriptions in the literature of dreams. But this pre- 
cipitation of images is not mysterious. Dream images 
are especially visual. The conversations that the 
dreamer supposes he has heard are for the most part 
reconstituted, completed, amplified at waking; perhaps 
even in some cases it is no more than the thought of 
the conversation, its meaning as a whole, which accom- 
panies the images. Now a multitude, however vast, 



i3o MIND-ENERGY 

of visual images may be given all at once in panorama ; 
how much the more so may it be in a succession of 
moments, however few! It is not astonishing, then, 
that the dream should gather into a few seconds what 
in waking life is extended over several days. It sees 
them foreshortened. It proceeds exactly as memory 
does. In the waking state, the visual memory which 
serves to interpret the visual sensation must fit it 
exactly; it follows the sensation as it unrolls, both of 
them occupy the same time. That is to say, the recog- 
nized perception of external events lasts just as long 
as the events themselves. But, in dream, the inter- 
pretative memory of the visual sensation regains its 
freedom; the fluidity of the visual sensation prevents 
the memory adhering to it; the rhythm of the inter- 
pretative memory has no longer, therefore, to adopt 
that of reality; and the images may then, if they 
please, rush along with a dizzy rapidity, like a cine- 
matograph film when the speed of the unwinding is 
not held in check. Precipitation is no more a sign 
of force in the domain of mind than abundance is. 
It is the regulating,— the constant precision of the 
adjustment, — which requires effort. Bring the inter- 
pretative memory to a state of tension, let it pay at- 
tention to life, let it, in short, get out of its dream: 
immediately the outside events will beat the measure 
for its walking and slacken its pace, — exactly as in 
a clock the pendulum portions and distributes over 



DREAMS 131 

several days the detension of the spring which would 
run down almost instantly if left free. 

Turning to the third point, I am now called upon 
to explain why the dream prefers such and such a 
recollection to others that are equally capable of cover- 
ing over the present sensation. But, unfortunately, 
the whims of the dream are hardly more explicable 
than those of the waking state. All that I can do is to 
point out their main tendency. In normal sleep, it is 
the thoughts which have passed like flashes through 
the mind, or the objects which we have perceived with- 
out paying attention to them, which dreams are most 
likely to bring back. If, at night, we dream of the 
events of the day, it is insignificant incidents, not im- 
portant facts, which will have the best chance of reap- 
pearing. I agree entirely on this point with the views 
of Delage, W. Robert and Freud. 2 I am in the street, 
I am waiting for a tramcar to pass, it cannot touch me 
because I am on the pavement. If, at the moment of 
its sweeping past, the idea of a possible danger crosses 
my mind, nay, even if my body instinctively recoils 
without my being conscious of feeling any fear, I 
may dream at night that I am run over. I am watch- 
ing by day at the sick-bed of a friend who is dying. 

2 I refer here to those repressed tendencies to which the Freudian 
school have devoted a great amount of research. At the time when 
this lecture was delivered, Freud's Traumdeutung had appeared, but 
" psychoanalysis " had not reached anything like its present develop- 
ment. 



i 3 2 MIND-ENERGY 

Only a ray of hope springs up for an instant, — a faint 
ray, I am barely conscious of it, — my dream at night 
may show me my friend recovered. In any case I 
should dream he was cured rather than dead or ill. 
What reappears by preference is what had been least 
noticed. There is nothing astonishing in this. The 
dream-self is a distraught self, a self which has let 
itself go. The memories which harmonize best with 
it are the memories of distraction, those which bear no 
mark of effort. 

Such are the observations I intended to offer you 
on the subject of dreams. They are, I know, incom- 
plete. Yet they concern dreams only as we know them 
today, those we remember and which belong there- 
fore rather to slight sleep. When we are in deep 
sleep, we may have dreams of another kind, but little 
or nothing remains of them when we wake. I incline 
to think, — though for theoretical and therefore hypo- 
thetical reasons, — that we have then a much more ex- 
tensive and detailed vision of our past. This deep 
slumber is that on which psychology ought to direct 
its effort, not only to study the structure and function- 
ing of unconscious memory, but also to investigate 
the more mysterious phenomena which are the subject- 
matter of " psychical research." I have not myself 
adventured on this ground; my inexperience does 
not prevent me, however, attaching great importance 
tt) the observations collected with such indefatigable 



DREAMS 133 

zeal by the Society for Psychical Research. To ex- 
plore the unconscious, to labour in the subsoil of mind 
with specially appropriate methods, will be the prin- 
cipal task of psychology in the century which is open- 
ing. I do not doubt that great discoveries await it, — 
discoveries as important, perhaps, as the preceding 
centuries have witnessed in the physical and natural 
sciences. Such at least is the hope I entertain for it, 
and with this parting wish I conclude. 



MEMORY OF THE PRESENT AND 
FALSE RECOGNITION 

An Article in the " Revue Philosophique" December, 1908. 

The illusion concerning which I am going to submit 
a few explanatory views is well known. Some one may 
be attending to what is going on or taking part in a 
conversation, when suddenly the conviction will come 
over him that he has already seen what he is now 
seeing, heard what he is now hearing, uttered the sen- 
tence he is uttering, — that he has already been here 
in this very place in which he now is, in the same cir- 
cumstances, feeling, perceiving, thinking and willing 
the same things, and, in fact, that he is living again, 
down to the minutest details, some moments of his 
past life. The illusion is sometimes so complete that, 
at every moment whilst it lasts, he thinks he is on the 
point of predicting what is going to happen: how 
should he not know it already, since he feels that he 
is about to have known it? It is by no means rare for 
the person under this illusion to perceive the external 
world under a peculiar aspect, as in a dream; he be- 
comes a stranger to himself, ready to be his double, 

134 



FALSE RECOGNITION 135 

present as a simple spectator at what he is saying and 
doing. This " depersonalization," to employ a term 
used to describe the experience by M. Dugas, 1 is not 
identical with or necessarily a symptom of false rec- 
ognition; it has, however, a certain relationship to it. 
Moreover, all the symptoms differ in degree. The 
illusion, instead of being a complete picture, may often 
present itself as a mere sketch. But, sketch or fin- 
ished picture, it always bears its original character. 

There are on record many descriptions of false re- 
cognition. They resemble one another in a striking 
manner, and are often set forth in identical terms. I 
have in my possession the self-observation of a literary 
man, which he specially undertook for me. He was 
skilled in introspection, had never heard of the illusion 
of false recognition, and believed himself to be the 
only person to experience it. His description con- 
sists of some dozen sentences, all of which are met 
with, in almost identical words, in the published records 
of other cases. I congratulated myself at first that 
I had at least obtained a new expression of it, for the 
author tells me that what dominates the phenomenon 
is a feeling of " inevitability," a feeling that no power 
on earth could stop the words and acts, about to come, 
from coming. But re-reading the cases recorded by 
M. Bernard-Leroy, 2 I find in one of them an identical 

1H Un Cas dc d6personnalisation," Rev. philos. (1898), pp. 500-507. 
*Ulllusion de fautse reconnaissance (Paris, 1898), p. 176. 



i 3 6 MIND-ENERGY 

expression : '■* I was a spectator of my own actions ; 
they were inevitable. " Indeed, it is doubtful if there 
exist another illusion stereotyped with such pre- 
cision. 

I do not include under false recognition certain il- 
lusions which resemble it on one side or another, but 
differ from it in their general aspect. M. Arnaud 
described in 1896 a remarkable case which he had 
then had under observation for three years. Through- 
out this time the patient had experienced, or believed 
he experienced, continuously the illusion of false 
recognition, imagining himself living his whole life 
over again. 3 This case, moreover, is not an isolated 
one ; it seems to approach very nearly a very early case 
described by Pick, 4 a case described by Krapelin 5 and 
also one related by Forel. 6 Reading these cases we 
are at once aware of something quite different from 
false recognition. The illusion does not spring up as 
a sharp and short impression, which surprises by its 
strangeness. The subject finds, on the contrary, that 
what he experiences is natural and normal; he some- 
times has need of that impression; he seeks it when it 
fails him, and believes it to be even more continuous 
than it is in reality. Studying the illusion more closely, 

3 Annales medko-psychologiques (1896), pp. 455-470. 

* Arch. f. Psychiatrie (1876), pp. 568-574. 
*Ibid, (1887), p. 428. 

• Das Gedachtnis und seine Abnormitaten (Zurich, 1885), pp. 44-45. 



FALSE RECOGNITION 137 

we discover other well-marked differences. In false 
recognition, the illusory memory is never localized in 
a particular point of the past; it dwells in an indeter- 
minate past, — the past in general. In these cases, on 
the contrary, the patients refer to a particular date 
the experience they claim already to have had; they 
are the prey of a real hallucination of memory. They 
are, it should be observed, all cases of insanity. That 
of Pick and those of Forel and Arnaud suffer delirious 
ideas of persecution; that of Krapelin is a maniac with 
hallucinations of vision and hearing. Their mental 
trouble may have some relation to that described by 
Coriat under the name of " reduplicative para- 
mnesia," 7 what Pick himself in a more recent work 
calls " a new form of paramnesia." 8 In this last case 
the subject believed he had already several times lived 
his actual life. Arnaud's patient had exactly the same 
illusion. 

A more delicate question is raised by the studies 
of M. Pierre Janet on psychasthenia. In opposition 
to most authorities, M. Janet considers false recogni- 
tion a purely pathological state, relatively rare, at any 
rate vague and indistinct, and he holds that it would 
be unjustifiable on the facts to describe it as a specific 

7 Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases (1904), pp. 577— 57^, 
639-659. 
*Jahrbiicher fur Psychiatric und Neurologie (1901). PP- i-35« 



13 8 MIND-ENERGY 

illusion of memory. 9 It is in reality concerned, in 
his view, with a much more general trouble. The 
" function of the real " is enfeebled, the patient has 
not completely succeeded in apprehending the actual; 
he cannot say with certainty whether now is present, 
past or even future; he will decide for the past if 
that idea be suggested in the questions put to him. 
That psychasthenia, which has been so thoroughly 
studied by M. Pierre Janet, is the dumping-ground 
of a host of anomalies, and that false recognition is 
one of them, I do not contest. Nor do I wish to dis- 
pute the psychasthenic character of false recognition 
in all cases. The question is, however, whether the 
phenomenon, when it is found precise, complete and 
sharply analysable into perception and memory, when, 
moreover, it is produced in people who present no 
other anomaly, has the same internal structure as when 
it appears with a vague form — rather a tendency or 
disposition than a definite clean-cut state — in minds 
which manifest a whole group of psychasthenic symp- 
toms. Suppose that false recognition, considered 
simply as we know it, a disorder always temporary 
and never severe, be a means contrived by nature 
in order to localize at one spot and limit to a few 
instants and so reduce to its mildest form a certain 
insufficiency which, were it to spread and, so to 

9 Les Obsessions et la psychasthenie (1903), vol. i. p. 287 ff.; cf. 
Journal de psychologic (1905), pp. 139-166. 



FALSE RECOGNITION 139 

speak, be diluted in the whole psychical life, would be 
psychasthenia : we should then expect that this concen- 
tration at one spot would give to the resulting state of 
rnind a precision, a complexity and above all an indi- 
viduality not found generally among patients suffering 
from general psychasthenia and thereby apt to shape 
into a vague form of false recognition, as well as into 
a great many other mental peculiarities, the radical 
deficiency from which they suffer. The illusion would 
in such case be a distinct psychical entity, whilst it is 
not so with general psychasthenic patients. Nothing 
we are told concerning this illusion in psychasthenic 
patients need be rejected. But what we have to ex- 
plain is why and how there is created the particular 
feeling of " already seen " in those cases — numerous, 
I believe — in which there is the very distinct affirma- 
tion of a present perception and of a past perception 
which has been identical with it. It must be borne in 
mind that many of those who have studied false rec- 
ognition — Jensen, Krapelin, Bonatelli, Sander, Anjel 
and others — were themselves subject to it. They 
have not limited themselves to collecting cases ; as pro- 
fessional psychologists, they have noted what they 
have themselves experienced. Now all these authori- 
ties agree in describing the phenomenon as being clearly 
a recommencement of the past, a twofold pheno- 
menon, which is perception on one side, memory on 
another, and not a phenomenon of single aspect, a 



i 4 o MIND-ENERGY 

state in which the reality appears simply in the air, 
detached from time, perception or memory at will. 
So, without sacrificing anything of what M. Pierre 
Janet has taught us on the subject of psychasthenia, 
we have none the less to find a special explanation of 
the phenomenon distinguished as false recognition. 10 

What is the explanation? In the first place, there 
is the view of those who hold that false recognition 
arises from the identification of an actual perception 
with a former perception really resembling it in its 
content, or at least in its affective tone. According 
to some of these authorities (Sander, 11 Hoffding, 12 Le 
Lorrain, 13 Bourdon, 14 Belugou 15 ) the past perception 
belongs to waking experience; according to others 
(James Sully, 16 Lapie, 17 etc.) to dream experience; 
according to Grasset, 18 to waking or to dreaming but 
always to the unconscious. According to all, whether 
they mean the memory of something seen or the mem- 

10 We may note that most authorities regard false recognition as a 
very wide-spread illusion. Wigan thought every one subject to it. 
Krapelin calls it a normal phenomenon. Jensen declares that almost 
any one, attentive to himself, may experience the illusion. 

11 Arch. f. Psychiatrie (1874), PP- 244-353. 

12 Psychologic, pp. 166-167. 

13 Rev. Philos. (1894), pp. 208-210. 

14 Rev. Philos. (1893), pp. 629-631. 
15 Rev. Philos. (1907), pp. 282-284. 
*• Illusions, p. 198. 

17 Rev. Philos. (1894), pp. 351-352. 
16 Journ. de psychologie (1904), pp. 17-27. 



FALSE RECOGNITION 141 

ory of something imagined, false recognition is a con- 
fused or incomplete recall of a real memory. 

This explanation may be accepted within the limits 
set by several of those who propose it. 19 It applies, 
in fact, to a phenomenon which resembles false rec- 
ognition in certain aspects. It has happened to all of 
us, in the presence of some new scene, to wonder 
whether we had not seen it before, and on reflexion 
we have found that we had formerly had an analogous 
perception which presented several features in common 
with the present experience. But this phenomenon is 
very different. In false recognition the two experi- 
ences appear strictly identical, and we feel indeed that 
no reflexion would reduce the identity to a vague re- 
semblance, because we are not simply beholding the 
" already seen " ; it is much more than that ; we are 
living through again the " already lived." We be- 
lieve we have to do with the complete reinstatement of 
one or of several minutes of our past with the totality 
of their content, presentative, affective, active. 
Krapelin, who has insisted on this primary difference, 
notices still another. 20 The illusion of false recogni- 
tion comes over a person suddenly and as suddenly 
vanishes, leaving behind it an impression of dream. 

19 Ribot and William James, who both thought out an explanation 
of this kind, were careful to add that they proposed it only as applica- 
ble to certain special cases: Ribot, Les Maladies de la memoir e, p. 
150; James, Principles of Psychology, vol. i. p. 675. 

20 Archiv. f. Psychiatrie (1887), pp. 409-436. 



142 MIND-ENERGY 

We find nothing of the kind in the confusion of a pres- 
ent experience with a former resembling experience — 
a confusion which is more or less gradual in establishing 
itself, and more or less easy to dissipate. Let me add 
(and this is perhaps essential) that such confusion is 
an error like other errors, a phenomenon localized in 
the domain of the pure intellect. On the contrary, 
false recognition may disturb our whole personality; 
it concerns feeling and will as well as intellect. Who- 
ever experiences it is often the prey of a characteristic 
emotion, becoming more or less a stranger to himself 
and, as it were, " automatized." In this case, there- 
fore, we have an illusion which includes different ele- 
ments and which organizes them into one single simple 
effect, a real psychic individuality. 21 

Where must we look for its seat? Is it to be found 
in an idea, in an emotion or in a state of will? 

The tendency to regard it as centred in an idea is 
characteristic of theories which explain false recogni- 
tion by bringing in an image supposed to have arisen 
in the course of perception or a little before it, and to 
have been at once thrown back into the past. To 
account for this image, it was first supposed that the 
brain was double, that it produced two simultaneous 
perceptions, one of which might in certain cases be 

21 The hypothesis of M. Grasset, according to which the first ex- 
perience had been registered by the unconscious, would, strictly speak- 
ing, avoid the last two objections, but not the first. 



FALSE RECOGNITION 143 

Egging by reason of its feebler intensity, and produce 
the effect of a memory (Wigan, 22 Jensen 23 ). 
Fouillee 24 also speaks of a " lack of synergy and simul- 
taneity in the cerebral centres," whence is produced 
a double vision (diplopie), "a pathological phenom- 
enon of echo and internal repetition." Contemporary 
psychology is seeking to get away from these ana- 
tomical schemes, and the hypothesis of a cerebral 
duality is now completely abandoned. There remains, 
then, the theory that the second image may be some 
part of the perception itself. According to Anjel, we 
must in fact distinguish two aspects in all perception: 
the one is the crude impression made on the conscious- 
ness, the other the taking possession of that impression 
by the mind. Ordinarily the two processes coincide, 
but if one lag behind the other, a double image results, 
and this occasions false recognition. 25 Pieron has put 
forward an analogous idea. 26 Lalande, 27 followed by 
Arnaud, 28 holds that a scene may produce on us an 
instantaneous first impression of which we are scarcely 
conscious, and to this there may succeed a distraction 
of some seconds, after which the normal perception is 
established. Should at this moment the first impres- 

22 A New View of Insanity: the Duality of the Mind (1884), p. 85. 
™ Allgemeine Zeitschift fur Psychiatrie, Suppl. (1868), pp. 48-63. 
u Rev. des Deux Mondes (1885), p. 154. 

25 Arch. f. Psychiatrie (1878), pp. 57-64. 

26 Rev. Philos. (1902), pp. 160-163. 

27 Rev. Philos. (1893), pp. 485-497. 

28 Annates medico-psychol. (1896), p. 455. 



144 MIND-ENERGY 

sion come back to us, it would have the effect of a 
vague memory not localizable in time, and we should 
then have false recognition. F. W. H. Myers pro- 
posed an explanation no less ingenious, founded on the 
distinction between the conscious and the subliminal 
ego. The conscious ego receives only a total impres- 
sion of a scene at which it is present, the details of it 
being always a little later than those of the external 
stimulus; the subliminal ego photographs these details 
one after the other, instantaneously. The latter is 
therefore in advance of consciousness, and, if suddenly 
manifested to it, brings a memory of that which the 
conscious ego is then occupied in perceiving. 29 
Lemaitre 30 has adopted a position intermediate be- 
tween those of Lalande and Myers. Before Myers, 
Dugas had put forward the hypothesis that there is a 
splitting of the personality. 31 Also, before either of 
these, Ribot had given great force to the theory of two 
images by his suggestion that there is in these cases a 
kind of hallucination intenser than perception and fol- 
lowing it : the hallucination throws the perception into 
the background, so giving it the dim form of a mere 
remembrance. 32 

It is impossible for me to undertake the full 

29 Proc. Soc. for Psychical Research (1895), p. 343. 

30 Arch, de Psychologie (1903), pp. 101-110. 

31 Rev. Philos. (1894), pp. 34-35. 
s2 Les Maladies de la memoir e, p. 152. 



FALSE RECOGNITION 145 

examination each of these theories deserves. I am 
content to say that I accept them in principle. I hold 
that false recognition implies the very real existence 
in consciousness of two images, one of which is the 
reproduction of the other. The great difficulty, in 
my view, is to explain, first, why one of the two images 
is thrown back into the past, and, second, why the il- 
lusion is continuous. If we take the image thrown 
back into the past to be anterior to the image localized 
in the present, if we see in it a first perception less 
intense, less attended to or less in consciousness than 
the later perception, we must at least attempt to explain 
why it takes the form of a memory; but, even then, 
we have to do only with the memory of a certain 
moment of the perception; the illusion will not be 
prolonged and renewed throughout the duration of the 
perception. If, on the contrary, the two images are 
formed together, then the continuity of the illusion 
is easier to understand, but the rejection of one of 
them into the past calls even more imperatively for 
explanation. We may indeed ask whether any one of 
the hypotheses, even of the first kind, really accounts 
for the throwing back, and whether the feebleness or 
subconsciousness of a perception suffices to give it the 
aspect of a memory. In any case, a theory of false 
recognition must answer at the same time both require- 
ments, and in my view the two requirements must ap- 



i 4 6 MIND-ENERGY 

pear irreconcilable so long as the nature of normal 
memory is not studied from the purely psychological 
standpoint. 

Can we escape the difficulty by denying the duality 
of the images, by invoking an " intellectual feeling " 
of the " already seen " and supposing it sometimes 
superadded to our perception of the present, making 
us believe in a recommencement of the past? This 
is the idea that has been put forward by M. Bernard- 
Leroy in an important work. 33 I am quite ready to 
agree with him that recognition of the present is gen- 
erally without any calling up of the past. I have 
myself shown that the " familiarity " of the objects of 
daily experience must be ascribed to the automatism 
of the reactions they provoke, and not to the presence 
of a memory-image doubling the perception-image. 
But this feeling of " familiarity " is surely not what 
intervenes in false recognition, and Mr. Bernard- 
Leroy has himself been at pains to distinguish 
the one from the other. The feeling of which M. 
Bernard-Leroy speaks can only be, then, the same as 
we experience when we say to ourselves, in passing 
a person in the street, that we must already have met 
him. But then such feeling is doubtless inseparably 

ts L'Illusion de fausse reconnaissance, 1898. The reading of this 
book, which describes many new cases, is indispensable to the student 
of the subject. Mile. J. Tobolowska, in her ttude sur les illusions du 
temps des rives (1900), adopts M. Bernard-Leroy's conclusions. 



FALSE RECOGNITION 147 

bound to a real memory, the memory of that person 
or of some one else who resembles him: it may be 
only the vague, almost extinct consciousness of this 
recollection, together with the nascent and unsuccessful 
effort to revive it. Then, too, it is significant that 
in such a case we say, " I have seen that person some- 
where " ; we do not say ," I have seen that person here, 
in these very circumstances, at a moment of my life 
indistinguishable from this actually present moment." 
If, then, false recognition has its root in a feeling, it 
is a feeling unique of its kind and it cannot be the 
feeling of normal recognition wandering over con- 
sciousness and deceived as to its destination. Being 
special, it must depend on special causes, and it be- 
hooves us to discover them. 

Let us, then, turn to the third group, theories ac- 
cording to which the origin of the phenomenon is to 
be sought in the sphere of action, rather than in that 
of feeling or in that of thought. Such is the most 
recent tendency. Many years ago, I myself called 
attention to the need of distinguishing various heights 
of tension or tone in psychical life. Consciousness,; 
I said, is better balanced the tenser its concentration 
on action, and more unstable the more it is detended 
in a kind of dream. Between these two extreme 
planes — the plane of action and the plane of dream 
— there are, I added, as many corresponding inter- 
mediate planes as there are decreasing degrees of " at- 



148 MIND-ENERGY 

tention to life " and adaptation to reality. (See Mat- 
ter and Memory, pp. 220—232.) My suggestions 
were received with a certain reserve, appearing to 
some people paradoxical. Psychology, however, is 
now coming nearer and nearer to them, especially since 
M. Pierre Janet from quite different considerations 
has reached conclusions altogether in agreement with 
them. It is in the lowering of such mental tone that, 
according to the third group of theories, we are to 
look for the origin of false recognition. In M. 
Pierre Janet's view, this lowering produces the 
phenomenon directly by diminishing the effort of 
synthesis accompanying normal perception, which then 
takes the aspect of a vague memory or a dream. 34 
More precisely, M. Janet thinks that we have to do 
here with one of the " feelings of incompletedness " 
which he has studied in so original a manner. The 
patient, puzzled at finding that his perception is incom- 
pletely real, and therefore incompletely present, hardly 
knows if he is dealing with the present or the past or 
even with the future. M. Leon-Kindberg has thought 
out and developed this idea of a diminution of the ef- 
fort of synthesis. 35 On the other hand, Heymans has 
tried to show how a " lowering of psychical energy " 
might modify the aspect of our habitual environment 

3 *Les Obsessions et la psychasthemie (1903), vol. i. p. 287; also 
Journal de psychologie (1905), pp. 289-307. 
35 Rev. de Psychiatric (1903), pp. 139-166, 



FALSE RECOGNITION 149 

and communicate the aspect of "already seen" to 
events which are happening in it. " Suppose," he says, 
" that our usual surrounding should arouse only very 
feebly the associations regularly awakened by it. 
There would then occur precisely what happens when 
after many years we see again places or objects, hear 
again melodies, formerly known but long since for- 
gotten. . . . Now, if in such cases of normal recollec- 
tion we have learnt to interpret the feebler push of 
associations as a sign of former experiences relating to 
the same objects as those now present, we may con- 
jecture that in the other cases too, where, following a 
diminution of psychical energy, the usual surrounding 
displays a very diminished associative power, we shall 
have the impression that in it are being repeated, 
identically, personal events and situations drawn from 
the depth of a nebulous past." 36 Lastly, in an elab- 
orate paper written by Dromard and Albes, and in 
which we find, drawn up as a self-observation, one of 
the most acute analyses ever given of false recogni- 
tion, 37 the phenomenon is explained as a diminution of 
" attentional tone " which brings about a rupture be- 
tween the " lower psychism " and the u higher psych- 
ism." The lower psychism, functioning without the 
aid of the higher, perceives the present object auto- 
matically, and the higher psychism is then entirely 

36 Zeitschrift fiir Psychologie (1904), pp. 321-343. 
3T Journal de Psychologie (1905), pp. 216-228. 



i 5 o MIND-ENERGY 

occupied in contemplating the image formed by the 
lower instead of regarding the object itself. 38 

I may say of these theories, as of the former, 
that I accept the principle underlying them. It is 
in a lowering of the general tone of the psychical life 
that the originating cause of false recognition is to be 
looked for. The delicate point is to determine the 
peculiar form which inattention to life takes in this 
case, and also we must explain why its effect is to mis- 
take the present for a repetition of the past. A mere 
slackening of the effort of synthesis may indeed give 
to reality the aspect of a dream — but why should 
such dream appear to be the complete repition of a 
moment already lived? Even supposing that the 
" higher psychism " intervenes in order to superpose 
its attention on this inattentive perception, all that we 
should have would be a memory attentively considered, 
and by no means a perception duplicated with a mem- 
ory. On the other hand, mere idleness of associative 
memory, such as Heymans supposes, would simply 
render difficult the recognition of the surroundings: it 
is a long way from the difficult recognition of some- 
thing familiar to the memory of a definite past identi- 
cal in every point with the present. It seems, then, 
that we must combine the two systems of explanation, 

88 In the same way, " depersonalisation " has been explained as a 
" lowering of vital tone." Cf. Dugas, " Un cas de depersonalisation," 
Rev. Philos., 1898, pp. 500-507. 



FALSE RECOGNITION 151 

admit that false recognition is at once a diminution of 
psychical tension and a duplication of the image, and 
inquire what must be the diminution which will pro- 
duce duplication, what the duplication which will 
simply express diminution. But it would be a mistake 
to devise any artificial scheme for reconciling the two 
theories. Let us simply study the mechanism of mem- 
ory in the two directions indicated, and the two theories 
will be seen to join together. 

However, a remark must first be made concerning 
all psychical facts that are morbid or abnormal. 
Among them are some which evidently point to an im- 
poverishment of the normal life. Such are the an- 
aesthesias, the amnesias, the aphasias, the paralyses, 
all those states, in fact, which are characterized by the 
loss of particular sensations, particular memories, or 
particular movements. In order to define these states 
we simply have to indicate what has disappeared from 
consciousness. They consist in an absence. We all 
agree in seeing in them a psychic deficiency. 

On the contrary, there are morbid or abnormal 
states which appear to add something to normal life 
and enrich it instead of impoverishing it. A delirium, 
a hallucination, an obsession, are positive facts. They 
consist in the presence, not in the absence, of some- 
thing. They seem to introduce into the mind certain 
new ways of feeling and thinking. To define them, 



152 MIND-ENERGY 

we have to consider what they are and what they 
bring, instead of what they are not and what they take 
away. If most of the symptoms of insanity belong to 
this second category, so also do a great many psychical 
anomalies and singularities. False recognition is one. 
As we shall see later, it presents an aspect sui generis, 
far different from that of true recognition. 

However, the philosopher may very well question 
whether, in the mental domain, disorder and degenera- 
tion can really be capable of creating something, and 
whether the apparently positive characters which give 
the abnormal phenomenon an aspect of novelty are 
not, when we come to study their nature, reducible to 
an internal void, a shortcoming of normality. Dis- 
ease, we generally say, is a diminution. True; but 
this is a vague way of expressing it, and we should 
indicate precisely, when no actual part of consciousness 
is missing, wherein the consciousness is diminished. I 
made an attempt of this kind in a former work to which 
I have already referred. I pointed out that, besides 
the diminution which affects the number of the states 
of consciousness, there is another which concerns their 
solidity or their weight. In the first case, the disorder 
simply and only eliminates some states without affect- 
ing others. In the second, no psychical state disap- 
pears but all are affected, all lose something of their 
ballast, that is to say, of their power of insertion and 
penetration into the reality. (See Matter and Mem- 



FALSE RECOGNITION 153 

ory, Chapter III., especially pp. 227-230.) It is the 
11 attention to life " which is diminished, and the new 
phenomena which are started are only the visible as- 
pect, the outward appearance of this detachment. 

I recognize, however, that even under this form the 
idea is still too general to be applied to the explanation 
of particular psychical facts. But it points the direc- 
tion we must follow to find an explanation. 

For, if we accept this principle, we shall not, in the 
case of a morbid or abnormal phenomenon presenting 
special characters, have to seek any active cause, be- 
cause the phenomenon, despite appearances, has noth- 
ing positive and nothing new about it. It was already 
being manufactured while the conditions were normal; 
but it was prevented from emerging, when about to 
appear, by one of those continually active inhibitory 
mechanisms which secure attention to life. This 
means that normal psychical life, as I conceive it, is a 
system of functions, each with its own psychic organ. 
Were each of these organs to work by itself, there 
would result a host of useless or untoward effects, 
liable to disturb the functioning of the others and so 
upset that adjustable equilibrium by which our adapta- 
tion to the environment is continually maintained. But 
a work of elimination, of correction, of bringing back 
to the point, is constantly going on, and it is precisely 
this work which secures a healthy mind. Wherever 
this work is slackened, symptoms seem to be created, 



154 MIND-ENERGY 

fresh and new, but in reality they were always there, 
or rather would have been there if nothing had inter- 
fered. I quite understand that the investigator should 
be struck with the sui generis character of the morbid 
facts. As they are complex and yet present a certain 
order in their complication, his first inclination is to 
relate them to an acting cause, capable of organizing 
the elements of them. But if, in the mental domain, 
disease is unable to create, it can only consist in the 
slackening or stopping of certain mechanisms which in 
the normal state prevent others from having their full 
effect. If this be so, then, in this case the principal 
task of psychology is not to explain why certain 
phenomena are produced in disordered minds f but why 
they are not found in the normally healthy mind. 

Already I have applied that method to the study 
of dreams. We are too much inclined to look upon 
dreams as if they were phantoms superadded to the 
solid perceptions and conceptions of our waking life, 
will-o-the-wisps which hover above it. They are 
supposed to be facts of a special order, to which psy- 
chology ought simply to devote a special chapter and 
then be quit of them. And it is natural they should 
appear so, because the waking state is what matters 
to us, whilst the dreaming state is most foreign to 
action and most useless. From the practical point 
of view dream is merely an accessory, so from the 
theoretical point of view we come to regard it as an 



FALSE RECOGNITION 155 

accident. But let us set aside this preconceived idea, 
and the dream-state will then be seen, on the contrary, 
to be the substratum of our normal state. The dream 
is not something fantastic hovering above and addi- 
tional to the reality of being awake; on the contrary, 
that reality of the waking state is gained by limitation, 
by concentration and by tension of a diffuse psychical 
life, which is the dream-life. In a sense, the percep- 
tion and memory we exercise in the dream-state are 
more natural than those in the waking state: there 
does consciousness disport itself, perceiving just to 
perceive, remembering just to remember, with no care 
for life, that is, for the action to be accomplished. 
But the waking state consists in eliminating, in choos- 
ing, in concentrating unceasingly the totality of the 
diffuse dream-life at the point where a practical prob- 
lem is presented. To be awake means to will. Cease 
to will, detach yourself from life, disinterest yourself, 
and by that mere abstention you pass from the awake- 
self to the dream-self — less tense but more extended. 
The mechanism of the awake-state is, then, the more 
complex, more delicate and more positive of the two, 
and it is the awake-state, rather than the dream-state, 
which requires explanation. 

Now, if dreams are in every respect an imitation 
or counterfeit of insanity, we may expect our remarks 
on dreams to apply as well to many forms of insanity. 
Of course, we must avoid approaching the study of 



i 5 6 MIND-ENERGY 

mental diseases with anything like a stereotyped sys- 
tem. It is doubtful if all the phenomena of insanity 
are to be explained on one and the same principle. 
And for many of them, still undefined, it is hardly pos- 
sible yet to attempt an explanation. As I said at 
first, I offer my view simply as a methodological indica- 
tion, with no other object than that of pointing a direc- 
tion for theoretical inquiry. There are, however, 
some pathological or abnormal facts to which I be- 
lieve it is even now applicable. One of the chief of 
these is false recognition. For the mechanism of per- 
ception and the mechanism of memory seem to me such 
that false recognition would arise naturally from the 
joint play of the two faculties, were there not a special 
mechanism intervening at the same time in order to 
prevent it. The important thing to know, then, is 
not why it arises in certain persons at particular mo- 
ments, but why it is not being produced at every mo- 
ment in everybody. 

How is a recollection formed? Let it first be clear, 
however, that the recollections of which I am going 
to speak are always psychical, although they may be 
more often unconscious than conscious or semi-con- 
scious. Concerning recollections considered as traces 
left in the brain, I have given my view in Matter and 
Memory, the work to which I have had frequent oc- 
casion to refer. I have attempted there to prove that 



FALSE RECOGNITION 157; 

the various memories are indeed localized in the brain, 
in the meaning that the brain possesses for each cate- 
gory of memory-images a special contrivance whose 
purpose is to convert the pure memory into a nascent 
perception or image; but if we go further than this, 
and suppose every recollection to be localized in the 
matter of the brain, we are simply translating un- 
doubted psychical facts into very questionable ana- 
tomical language, and we end in consequences which 
are contradicted by observation. Indeed, when we 
speak of our recollections, we think of something our 
consciousness possesses or can always recover by 
drawing in, so to say, the thread which holds it. The 
recollection, in fact, passes to and fro from conscious- 
ness to unconsciousness, and the transition from one 
to the other is so continuous, the limit between the 
two states so little marked, that we have no right to 
suppose a radical difference of nature between them. 
It is memory in this purely psychical meaning of which 
I am going to speak. On the other hand, let us agree 
to call " perception " the consciousness of anything 
that is present, whether it be an internal or an external 
object. Both definitions being granted, I hold that 
the formation of memory is never posterior to the 
formation of perception; it is contemporaneous with it. 
Step by step, as perception is created, the memory of 
it is projected beside it, as the shadow falls beside the 
body. But, in the normal condition, there is no con- 



158 MIND-ENERGY 

sciousness of it, just as we should be unconscious of 
our shadow were our eyes to throw light on it each 
time they turn in that direction. 

For suppose memory is not created at the same 
moment as the perception: at what moment will it 
begin to exist ? Does it wait till the perception is van- 
ished that it may then arise ? This is what we usually 
suppose, whether we think unconscious recollections 
are psychical states or cerebral modifications. In the 
one case we suppose a present psychical state, the 
perception, then, when that no longer exists, the re- 
membrance of that absent perception. In the other 
case, we think that when certain cells come into play 
there is perception, and that the action of those cells 
has left traces so that, when the perception has van- 
ished, there is memory. But, if things happen in this 
way, the course of our conscious existence must be 
composed of clear-cut states, each of which must begin 
objectively, and also objectively end. Now, is it not 
clear that dividing psychical life into states, as we 
divide a play into scenes, is relative to the varied and 
changing interpretations we give of our past and has 
nothing absolute about it? According to the point 
of view in which I am placed, or the centre of interest 
which I choose, I divide yesterday differently, discover- 
ing several very different series of situations or states 
in it. Though these divisions are not all equally 
artificial, not one existed in itself, because the unrolling 



FALSE RECOGNITION 159 

of psychical life is continuous. The afternoon I hap- 
pen to have spent in the country with friends has 
broken up into luncheon + walk + dinner, or into con- 
versation + conversation + conversation, etc., and of 
none of these conversations, treading as it were on the 
heels of another, could it be said that it forms a dis- 
tinct entity. Scores of systems of carving are possible ; 
no system corresponds with joints of reality. What 
right have we, then, to suppose that memory chooses 
one particular system, or that it divides psychical life 
into definite periods and awaits the end of each period 
in order to rule up its accounts with perception ? 

Is it alleged that the perception of an external 
object begins when the object appears, and ends when 
it disappears, and that therefore we can, in this case 
at least, mark the precise moment when memory re- 
places perception? But this is to ignore the fact that 
the perception is ordinarily composed of successive 
parts, and that these parts have just as much indi- 
viduality, or rather just as little, as the whole. Of 
each of them we can as well say that its object is 
disappearing all along: how, then, could the recollec- 
tion arise only when everything is over? And how 
could memory know, at any particular moment of the 
operation, that everything was not over yet, that per- 
ception was still incomplete ? 

The more we reflect, the more impossible it is to 
imagine any way in which the recollection can arise 



160 MIND-ENERGY 

if it is not created step by step with the perception 
itself. Either the present leaves no trace in memory, 
or it is twofold at every moment, its very up-rush 
being in two jets exactly symmetrical, one of which 
falls back towards the past whilst the other springs 
forward towards the future. But the forward-spring- 
ing one, which we call perception, is that alone which 
interests us. We have no need of the memory of 
things whilst we hold the things themselves. Practi- 
cal consciousness throwing this memory aside as use- 
less, theoretical reflexion holds it to be non-existent. 
Thus the illusion arises that memory succeeds per- 
ception. But this illusion has another source deeper 
still. 

The main cause is that the reanimated and con- 
scious memory produces on us the effect of the per- 
ception itself, and appears to be the resurrection of 
the perception, feebler but not substantially # different. 
Between the perception and the memory there seems 
to be a difference of intensity or degree, but not of 
nature. The perception being defined a strong state 
and the remembrance a weak state, the remembrance 
of a perception being necessarily then nothing else 
than that same perception weakened, it seems to us 
that memory, in order to register a perception in the 
unconscious, must wait until the whole of it goes to 
sleep. And so we suppose the remembrance of a 
perception cannot be created while the perception is 



FALSE RECOGNITION 161 

being created nor be developed at the same time. 

But the theory that present perception is a strong 
state, and revived recollection a feeble state, that per- 
ception passes into recollection by way of diminution, 
is contradicted by the most elementary observation of 
fact. Take an intense sensation and make it gradu- 
ally decrease to zero. If there is only a difference of 
degree between the remembrance of the sensation and 
the sensation itself, the sensation will become memory 
before it disappears. Now, a moment may come when 
you are unable to say whether you are dealing with z. 
weak sensation experienced or a weak sensation im- 
agined, but the weak state never becomes the recol- 
lection, thrown back into the past, of the strong state. 
The recollection, then, is a totally different thing. 

The recollection of a sensation is capable of suggest- 
ing the sensation, I mean of causing it to be born 
again, feeble at first, then stronger and stronger in 
proportion as the attention is more fixed upon it. 
But the recollection is distinct from the sensation it 
suggests; and it is precisely because we feel it behind 
the sensation it suggests, as the hypnotizer is behind 
the hallucination he provokes, that we localize its cause 
in the past. Sensation is essentially what is actual and 
now; but the recollection which suggests it from the 
depths of the unconscious, hardly emerging upwards, 
has that power sui generis of suggestion which be- 
longs to things that are no more and would fain exist 



1 62 MIND-ENERGY 

again. Hardly has the suggestion touched the im- 
agination than the thing suggested is outlined in its 
nascent state, and this is why it is so difficult to dis- 
tinguish between a weak sensation experienced and a 
weak sensation which we remember without dating 
it. But the suggestion is in no degree what it sug- 
gests. The pure recollection of a sensation or of a 
perception is not a degree of the sensation or the per- 
ception itself. To suppose it so would be like saying 
that the word of the hypnotizer, in order to suggest 
to the hypnotized patient that he has in his mouth 
sugar or salt, must already itself be a little sugared or 
salted. 

If we try to discover the source and purpose of 
this illusion, we find that innate in our mind is the 
need to represent our whole inner life as modelled 
on that very small part of ourself which is inserted 
into the present reality, the part which perceives it 
and acts upon it. Our perceptions and our sensa- 
tions are at once what is clearest in us and most im- 
portant for us ; they note at each moment the changing 
relation of our body to other bodies; they determine 
or direct our conduct. Thence our tendency to see in 
the other psychical facts nothing but perceptions or 
sensations obscured or diminished. Those, indeed, 
among us who resist this tendency, who believe thought 
to be something other than a play of images, yet have 
some trouble in persuading themselves that the remem- 



FALSE RECOGNITION 163 

brancc of a perception is radically different from the 
perception itself. The remembrance must at any rate, 
it seems to them, be expressible in terms of perception. 
It must then be obtained by some operation effected on 
the image. What is the operation? Here a process 
of natural reasoning intervenes. We can say a priori 
that the operation must effect an alteration in the 
quality of the content of the image, or in its quantity, 
or in both at once. Now, it is certainly not in the 
quality, since memory must represent the past to us 
without altering it. It must be then in the quantity. 
But quantity, in its turn, may be extensive or intensive, 
for the image comprehends a definite number of parts 
and it presents a certain degree of force. Does, then, 
memory modify the extension of the image? Evi- 
dently not, for if it added anything to the past, it 
would be unfaithful to it, and if it subtracted some- 
thing from the past, it would be incomplete. We 
conclude, then, that the modification bears on the in- 
tensity; and as it is evidently not an increase, it must be 
a diminution. Such is the instinctive, scarcely con- 
scious dialectic by which we are led, from elimination 
to elimination, to see in the remembrance an enfeeble- 
ment of the image. 

When once we have reached this conclusion, our 
whole psychology of memory is inspired by it; even 
our physiology feels the effect of it. In whatever 
way we then conceive the cerebral mechanism of per- 



1 64 MIND-ENERGY 

ception, we see in recollection nothing but the same 
mechanism set going anew, an attenuated repetition 
of the same fact. Facts stand before us, however, 
and seem to point to the opposite direction. They 
evidence that a man can lose visual recollections with- 
out ceasing to see and auditory recollections without 
ceasing to hear, that psychic blindness and deafness 
do not necessarily imply loss of sight or of hearing: 
how would this be possible if perception and memory 
were concerned with the same centres, and put in 
play the same mechanisms? But we turn aside or 
pass on, rather than assent to a radical distinction be- 
tween perception and memory. 

In so far, then, as our reason reconstructs psychical 
life out of conscious states sharply delineated, and in 
so far as it judges that all those states are expressible 
in terms of images, it is following two paths which 
converge in making memory an enfeebled perception, 
something which follows the perception instead of be- 
ing contemporaneous with it. Set aside this natural 
dialectic of the intellect, convenient though it be for 
expression in language, possibly indispensable in prac- 
tice, but not suggested by inward observation, and ob- 
serve what actually takes place. The memory will be 
seen to duplicate the perception at every moment, to 
arise with it, to be developed at the same time, and 
to survive it precisely because it is of a quite different 
nature. 



FALSE RECOGNITION 165 

What, then, is a memory? Every clear description 
of a psychical state is made up of images, and we are 
saying that the recollection of an image is not an 
image. The pure recollection, then, can only be 
described in a vague manner and in metaphoric terms. 
Let me repeat, then, an explanation I suggested in 
Matter and Memory (pp. 167 and 172 and also the 
first chapter). The memory seems to be to the per- 
ception what the image reflected in the mirror is to the 
object in front of it. The object can be touched as 
well as seen; acts on us as well as we on it; is pregnant 
with possible actions; it is actual. The image is vir- 
tual, and though it resembles the object, it is incapable 
of doing what the object does. Our actual existence, 
then, whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself all 
along with a virtual existence, a mirror-image. Every 
moment of our life presents two aspects, it is actual 
and virtual, perception on the one side and memory on 
the other. Each moment of life is split up as and 
when it is posited. Or rather, it consists in this very 
splitting, for the present moment, always going for- 
ward, fleeting limit between the immediate past which 
is now no more and the immediate future which is not 
yet, would be a mere abstraction were it not the mov- 
ing mirror which continually reflects perception as a 
memory. 

Let us imagine a mind to become conscious of this 
duplicating. Suppose the reflexion of our perception 



1 66 MIND-ENERGY 

and of our action comes to consciousness not when the 
perception is complete and the action accomplished, but 
continuously and simultaneously, step by step, as we 
perceive and act. We must then see, at one and the 
same time, our real existence and its virtual image, the 
object on one side and its reflexion on the other. 
Moreover, the reflexion can not be confused with the 
object, for the object has all the characters of percep- 
tion whilst the reflexion is already memory: were it 
not memory from the first, it never could become so. 
Later on, when performing its normal function, it will 
represent our past to us with the mark of the past; 
discerned at the very moment in which it is formed, it 
is already with the mark of the past, which is constitu- 
tive of its essence, that it appears to us. What past? 
A past that has no date and can have none; it is the 
past in general, it cannot be any past in particular. 
No doubt, if it were merely a past scene or a past emo- 
tion, we might be actually deceived and believe that we 
have already perceived the scene we are actually per- 
ceiving, that we have already experienced the motion 
we are experiencing. But it is far more than this. 
What is duplicating itself at each moment into per- 
ception and memory is the totality of what we are see- 
ing, hearing and experiencing, all that we are with all 
that surrounds us. As we are becoming conscious of 
this duplication, it is the entirety of our present which 
must appear to us at once as perception and as mem- 



FALSE RECOGNITION 167 

ory. And yet we know full well that no life goes 
twice through the same moment of its history, that 
time does not remount its course. What is to be done ? 
The case is most extraordinary and bewildering. It 
contradicts everything that we have been accustomed 
to. We feel that we are confronted with a recollec- 
tion: a recollection it must be, for it bears the charac- 
teristic mark of states we usually call by this name 
and which only appear when their object has dis- 
appeared. And yet it does not present to us some- 
thing which has been, but simply something which is; 
it advances pari passu with the perception which it 
reproduces. It is a recollection of the present moment 
in that actual moment itself. It is of the past in its 
form and of the present in its matter. It is a memory 
of the present. 

Step by step, as the situation progresses, the memory 
which keeps pace with it gives to each of its stages 
the aspect of " already seen," the feeling of already 
known. But the situation, even before it has come 
to an end, seems to us something which must form a 
whole, being cut out of the continuity of our experi- 
ence by the interest of the moment. Now, how could 
we have already lived a part of the situation if we had 
not lived the whole of it? Could we recognize what 
is being unrolled if we did not know what is still 
rolled up? Are we not able at each moment to anti- 
cipate at least the following moment? The instant 



i68 MIND-ENERGY 

which is about to come is already broken into by the 
instant which now is; the content of the one is in- 
separable from the content of the other: therefore, if 
the present instant belongs already to my past, must 
not the coming instant belong to it equally? If I 
recognize the present instant, am I not quite as surely 
going to recognize the coming one? So I am un- 
ceasingly, towards what is on the point of happening, 
in the attitude of a person who will recognize and who 
consequently knows. But this is only the attitude of 
knowledge, the form of it without the matter. As I 
cannot predict what is going to happen, I quite realize 
that I do not know it; but I foresee that I am going 
to have known it, in the sense that I shall recognize 
it when I shall perceive it; and this recognition to 
come, which I feel inevitable on account of the rush of 
my faculty of recognizing, exercises in advance a retro- 
active effect on my present, placing me in the strange 
position of a person who feels he knows what he knows 
he does not know. 

Suppose we catch ourselves repeating mechanically 
something we once knew by heart but had long for- 
gotten. As we recognize each word the moment we 
pronounce it, we have a feeling that we possess it before 
pronouncing it; and yet we only get it back while we 
pronounce it. Whoever becomes conscious of the 
continual duplicating of his present into perception 
and memory will be in the same state. If even slightly 



FALSE RECOGNITION 169 

capable of self-analysis, he will compare himself to an 
actor playing his part automatically, listening to him- 
self and beholding himself play. The more deeply 
he analyses his experience, the more he will split into 
two personages, one of which moves about on the stage 
while the other sits and look's. On the one hand, 
he knows that he continues to be what he was, a self 
who thinks and acts conformably to what the situation 
requires, a self inserted into real life and adapting 
itself to it by a free effort of will; this is what his pre- 
ception of the present assures him. But the memory 
of this present, which is equally there, makes him be- 
lieve that he is repeating what has been said already, 
seeing again what has been seen already, and so trans- 
forms him into an actor reciting his part. Thence 
two different selves, one of which, conscious of its 
liberty, erects itself into an independent spectator of 
a scene which the other seems to be playing in a 
mechanical way. But this duplication does not go 
through to the end. It is rather an oscillation between 
two standpoints from which one views oneself, a go- 
ing and coming of the mind between perception which 
is only perception and perception duplicated with 
memory. The first implies the habitual feeling we 
have of our freedom and quite naturally inserts itself 
into the real world. The second makes us believe 
we are repeating a part we have learned, converts 
us into automata, transports us into a stage-world or 



170 MIND-ENERGY 

a world of dream. Whoever has experienced during 
a few seconds a pressing danger, from which he has 
only been able to escape by a rapid series of actions 
imperatively called for and boldly executed, knows 
something of the kind. It is a duplication rather 
virtual than actual. We act and yet " are acted." 
We feel that we choose and will, but that we are 
choosing what is imposed on us and willing the 
inevitable. Thence a compenetration of states which 
melt into one another and even coincide in immediate 
consciousness, but which are none the less logically 
incompatible. Because they are logically incompati- 
ble, reflective consciousness will represent them by a 
duplication of the self into two different personages, 
one of which appropriates freedom, the other neces- 
sity: the one, a free spectator, beholds the other auto- 
matically playing his part. 

To sum up: I have imagined a mind, in its normal 
state, to become conscious of the duplication which is 
constantly but unconsciously going on, and I have 
described, in the last three pages, the three principal 
aspects under which that mind would appear to itself 
if it could thus witness the splitting of its present. 
Now, these are the very characteristics of false recog- 
nition. We find them the more accentuated the more 
definite the phenomenon is, the more complete it is, 
and the more profoundly analysed it is by the person 
who experiences it. 



FALSE RECOGNITION 171 

Several of those who have experienced it have 
spoken, to begin with, of a feeling of automatism, and 
of a state comparable to that of an actor playing a 
part. What is said and what is done, what the person 
himself says and does, appear " inevitable." He is 
looking on at his own movements, thoughts and ac- 
tions. 30 Things happen as though his personality 
were duplicated, without, however, there being actual 
duplication. One of them writes: " This feeling of 
duplication only exists in the sensation; the two per- 
sons are only one from the material standpoint." He 
means probably that he experiences a feeling of duality, 
but accompanied with the consciousness that there is 
only one person. 40 

On the other hand, as I said at the beginning of 
this essay, the subject of this experience often finds 
himself in the singular state of mind of a person who 
believes he knows what is about to happen at the same 
time that he feels quite unable to predict it. " It 
seems always to me," says one, " that I am foreseeing 
what is going to happen, yet I cannot actually announce 
it." Another recalls what is going to happen " as 
one recalls a name which is at the uttermost ends of 
memory." 41 One of the earliest observations is that 

89 See especially the cases collected by Bernard-Leroy, op. cit, pp. 176, 
182, 185, 232. 
40 Bernard-Leroy, op. cit. p. 186. 
"Lalande, Rtv. Philos. (1893), p. 487. 



172 MIND-ENERGY 

of one who believed he knew beforehand what the 
people around him would do. 42 We have in this a 
second characteristic of false recognition. 

But the most general characteristic of all is the one 
to which I first called attention. The memory evoked 
is a loose memory, with no point of attachment in the 
past. It does not correspond with any former ex- 
perience. The subject knows it, is convinced of it, 
and the conviction is not the effect of reasoning, it is 
immediate. It is a feeling that the recollection evoked 
must be simply a duplicate of the actual perception. 
Is it, then, a " memory of the present " ? If he does 
not use these words, it is probably because the expres- 
sion would appear to him contradictory, because he 
only conceives memory as a repetition of the past, 
because it does not seem possible that a representation 
can bear the mark of the past independently of what 
it represents. In fact, he theorizes without knowing 
it, and holds all memory to have been formed after 
the perception which it reproduces. Yet he affirms 
something very like it when he speaks of a past which 
no interval separates from the present. " I felt 
within me a kind of click which did away with all the 
past lying between that minute of long ago and the 
minute in which I then was." 43 These words give 
expression to the most distinctive mark of the pheno- 

* 2 Jensen, op. cit. p. 57. 

48 F. Gregh, quoted by Bernard-Leroy, p. 183. 



FALSE RECOGNITION 173 

menon. When we speak of it as " false recognition," 
we ought to add that it is a process which does not 
really counterfeit true recognition and which does 
not give the illusion of it. What, in fact, is 
normal recognition? It may be produced in two 
ways, either by a feeling of familiarity which accom- 
panies the present perception, or by the evoking of a 
past perception which the present perception seems 
to repeat. Now false recognition is neither of these 
two operations. What characterizes the first kind of 
recognition is that it excludes any recall of a definite 
personal situation in which the recognized object had 
formerly been perceived. My desk, my table, my 
books form around me an atmosphere of familiarity 
only so long as they do not call up the recollection 
of any definite event of my history. If they evoke 
the exact recollection of an incident in which they 
have been mixed up, I recognize them as having been 
a part of that incident, but this recognition is super- 
added to the first and is fundamentally distinct from 
it, as distinct as the personal from the impersonal. 
Now false recognition is something quite different 
from this feeling of familiarity. It always bears 
on a personal situation, which we are convinced is the 
identical reproduction of another personal situation, 
just as precise and as definite. It would seem, then, 
that it must be recognition of the second kind, one 
which implies the recall of a former situation like the 



174 MIND-ENERGY 

present one. But then it should be noticed that we 
have always to do in such cases with situations similar 
and not identical. Recognition of the second kind 
is brought about by the idea of what differentiates 
the two situations and not only of what is common 
to them. If I am at a play which I have seen before, 
I recognize one by one each of the words and each of 
the scenes; at last I recognize the whole piece and 
recall having seen it before; but I had then a 
different seat, and other neighbours, and was taken 
up with other preoccupations; in any case I could 
not have been then what I am today, since I have 
lived in the meanwhile. If, then, the two images 
are the same, they are not presented in the same 
frame, and the vague feeling of the difference of the 
frames surrounds, like a fringe, the consciousness I 
have of the identity of the images, and allows me at 
every moment to distinguish them. In false recogni- 
tion, on the contrary, the frames are just as identical 
as the images themselves. I am present at the same 
play with the same sensations, the same preoccupations, 
I am at this very moment in the very same position, 
at the same date, at the same instant of my history 
where and when I then was. It is, then, hardly fit to 
speak here of illusion, since the illusory knowledge 
is the imitation of a real knowledge, and since the 
phenomenon with which we are dealing imitates no 
other phenomenon of our experience. And it is 



FALSE RECOGNITION 175 

hardly fit to speak of false recognition, since there is no 
true recognition, of the one kind or of the other, of 
which it could be the exact counterfeit. We are in 
fact dealing with a phenomenon unique of its kind, 
the very phenomenon which the memory of the 
present would produce, were it to rise up instantan- 
eously from the unconscious where it must lie. It 
would appear as memory, since memory bears a dis- 
tinctive mark, different from that of perception; but 
it could not be carried back to any past experience, 
because each of us knows indeed that we do not live 
twice through one and the same moment of our his- 
tory. 

I turn now to the problem why this memory is 
ordinarily concealed, and how it is revealed in extra- 
ordinary cases. In a general way, or by right, the 
past only reappears to consciousness in the measure 
in which it can aid us to understand the present and 
to foresee the future. It is the forerunner of action. 
We go wrong when we study the functions of thought 
in their isolated state as if they were an end in them- 
selves, and we pure minds occupied in contemplating 
ideas and images. The present perception would in 
that case attract to itself a resembling memory with no 
suspicion of utility, without purpose, for mere pleasure 
— the pleasure of introducing into the mental world 
a law of attraction analogous to that which governs 
the material world. Without questioning the M law 



176 MIND-ENERGY 

of similarity," I may point out that any two ideas 
and any two images taken at random, however distant 
from one another we may suppose them to be, must 
have some relation of similarity since we can always 
find a common genus into which to make them enter: 
so that any perception would recall any recollection 
if there were nothing more, here, than a mechanical 
attraction of like for like. But the fact is that if 
a perception recalls a memory, it is in order that 
the circumstances which have preceded, accompanied 
and followed the past situation, should throw some 
light on the present situation and indicate the way out 
of it. Thousands and thousands of memories evoked 
by resemblance are possible, but the memory which 
tends to reappear is the one which resembles the 
perception by a particular side, that namely which may 
illumine and direct the action in preparation. Even 
this memory need not show itself; it is enough if, 
without showing itself, it recall the circumstances 
which have been given in contiguity with it, what has 
preceded and what has followed, what in short it is 
important to know in order to understand the present 
and anticipate the future. We may even suppose 
that the contiguous circumstances need not be mani- 
fested to consciousness, so long as the conclusion can 
appear, that is to say, the exact suggestion of a certain 
thing to do. It is in this mode, probably, that con- 
sciousness works in most animals. But the more the 



FALSE RECOGNITION 177 

consciousness is developed, the more it illumines the 
work of the memory, and the more, too, it lets associa- 
tion by resemblance, which is the means, shine through 
association by contiguity, which is the end. When 
once the association has had official recognition in con- 
sciousness, it allows the introduction of a crowd of 
fancy memories, which resemble the present state but 
may be devoid of actual interest. In this way we 
may explain why we can dream as well as act; but 
it is the needs of action which determine the laws of 
recall; they alone hold the keys of consciousness, and 
fancy memories only slip in by taking advantage of 
what is lax and ill-defined in the relation of resemblance 
which legally entitles to a pass. In short, if the 
totality of our recollections be at every moment push- 
ing upward from the depth of the unconscious, con- 
sciousness, attentive to life, only admits, legally, those 
which can offer their assistance to the present action, 
although, in fact, many others slip in because there 
must be a general rule, and because the rule, here, is 
that resemblance secures admittance. 

But what can be more unavailing for our present 
action than memory of the present? Rather would 
any other kind of memory be entitled to lay a claim, 
for it at least brings with it some information, though 
it be of no actual interest. Alone, memory of the 
present has nothing to teach us, being only the double 
of perception. We have the real object, what are 



178 MIND-ENERGY 

we to do with the virtual image of it? As well let 
go the substance for the shadow. This is why there 
is no memory from which our attention is more ob- 
stinately turned away. 

By attention, of course, I do not mean here that 
individual attention which varies in its intensity, 
direction and duration according to personal tempera- 
ment. I am alluding to what I should call racial at- 
tention, an attention naturally turned towards certain 
regions of psychical life, naturally turned away from 
others. Within each of these regions our individual 
attention may be directed, no doubt by its own 
caprice, but it then simply supervenes on that racial 
attention, as the choice that the individual eye makes 
of particular visual objects is superposed on the choice 
which the human eye has made once for all, of a cer- 
tain definite region of the spectrum in which it sees 
light. Now, while a slight failure of individual atten- 
tion is only absent-mindedness, — a normal thing, — 
any failure of racial attention takes the form of a 
pathological or abnormal fact. 

False recognition is such an anomaly. It indicates 
a temporary enfeebling of general attention to life: 
consciousness, no longer turning in its natural direc- 
tion, allows itself to look at what it has no interest 
in perceiving. But what are we to understand here 
by " attention to life "? What is the particular kind 
of inattention which ends in false recognition? At- 



FALSE RECOGNITION 179 

tention and inattention are vague terms. Can we de- 
fine them more exactly in this particular case? Let 
me try to do so, without claiming, however, to attain 
in so obscure a subject complete clearness and definite 
precision. 

We hardly notice the extent to which our present 
consists in an anticipation of our future. The vision 
reflective consciousness gives us of our inner life is 
that of one state succeeding another state, each com- 
mencing at one point, finishing at another, and 
provisionally self-sufficing. Consciousness, in this re- 
flective vision, is preparing the way for language; it 
is distinguishing, separating and juxtaposing; it is only 
at its ease in the definite and the immobile; it stops at 
a static conception of reality. But immediate con- 
sciousness grasps quite another thing. Immanent in 
the inward life, it feels rather than sees it, but feels it 
as a movement, as a continual treading on a future 
which recoils without ceasing. Indeed, this feeling 
becomes very clear when it concerns a definite act we 
are called on to perform. The end of the action ap- 
pears to us immediately; and, during the whole time 
that we are acting, we are conscious not so much of the 
successive states as of a decreasing distance between 
our actual position and the end towards which we are 
approaching. This end, moreover, is perceived only 
as a provisional end; we know there is something else 
behind; in the spring we take to leap the first obstacle 



180 MIND-ENERGY 

we are already preparing to leap a second, until other 
leaps will take place and succeed one another in- 
definitely. Again, when we listen to a sentence, we 
need not pay attention to each word taken separately, 
it is the meaning of the whole which matters : from the 
very beginning we are reconstructing this meaning 
hypothetically ; our mind darts forward in a certain 
general direction, only having to inflect it here and 
there according as the sentence, unrolling, pushes our 
attention towards one meaning or another. Here 
again the present is perceived in the future on which 
it treads, rather than apprehended in itself. This 
vital impulse gives to all the psychical states it causes 
us to pass or leap over a particular aspect, which is so 
constant and to which we are so accustomed that we 
only become aware of it when it is missing. Every 
one may have observed the strange character a familiar 
word sometimes takes when we fix our attention on it. 
The word appears new, and really is so, for till then 
our consciousness had not made it a stopping place ; we 
had always passed it by to come to the end of a sen- 
tence. We cannot compress the impulse of our whole 
psychical life as completely as we compress that of our 
speech; but whenever the general impulse is enfeebled, 
the situation passed through must appear as strange 
as the sound of a word immobilized in the course of 
the movement of the sentence. It is no longer part 
and parcel of real life. Looking in our past experi- 



FALSE RECOGNITION 181 

cnce for what resembles it most, we are likely to com- 
pare it with dream. 

Now, it is remarkable that most of the recorded 
cases of false recognition just describe the experience 
as an impression of dream. Paul Bourget, for ex- 
ample, observes that the illusion is accompanied by " a 
kind of unanalysable feeling that reality is a dream." 44 
And an English writer some years ago, describing his 
own experience, applied the epithet " shadowy " to 
the whole phenomenon, adding that it appeared later, 
when it was recollected, as " the half-forgotten relic 
of a dream. 1 ! Thus we have observers, unknown to 
one another, speaking different languages, expressing 
themselves in actually equivalent terms. The impres- 
sion of dream, then, is almost general. 

It is also remarkable that persons subject to false 
recognition are often liable to finding a familiar word 
strange. An inquiry instituted by G. Heymans has 
shown that these two dispositions are connected to- 
gether. He adds very justly that current theories 
of the first phenomenon do not explain why it is asso- 
ciated with the second. 

In these conditions, ought we not to look for the 
initial cause of false recognition in a momentary stop 
of the impulse of our consciousness, a stop which, no 
doubt, does not change anything in the materiality 
of our present, but detaches it from the future to 

44 Bernard Leroy, op. ciU p. 169. 



1 82 MIND-ENERGY 

which it cleaves and from the action which would be 
its normal conclusion, so giving it the aspect of a 
mere picture, of a play which is being presented to 
the player, of a reality transposed into dream? Let 
me now describe an impression derived from my own 
personal experience. I am not subject to false re- 
cognition, but I have tried very often, since I have 
studied it, to place myself in the state of mind de- 
scribed by observers and to induce experimentally the 
phenomenon in myself. I have never quite succeeded, 
but I have obtained on various occasions something 
approaching it, although very fugitive. The scene 
in which I find myself must be not only new to me, 
but in strong contrast with the course of my habitual 
life. It may be, for example, a scene when I am 
on a journey, but this journey must have been im- 
provised, not premeditated. The first condition is, 
then, that I should experience a certain quite peculiar 
astonishment, which I will call the astonishment at find- 
ing myself there. On this astonishment there comes 
to be grafted a feeling rather different from it, but yet 
in relationship with it, the feeling that the future h 
closed, that the situation is detached from everything 
although I am attached to it. In the degree that 
these emotions interpenetrate, the reality loses its 
solidity and my perception of the present tends to 
duplicate itself with something which is behind it. Is 



FALSE RECOGNITION 183 

this the memory of the present appearing through? 
I do not venture to say so; but it seems to me that 
I am then verily on the road to false recognition, and 
that a very little would bring me to it. 

Now, why does memory of the present wait, before 
it can be revealed, for the impulse of consciousness 
to slacken or to stop? We know nothing of the 
mechanism by which an idea comes out of the uncon- 
scious or falls back into it. All we can do is to have 
recourse to a provisional scheme by which we can 
symbolize the operation. Let us come back to the 
one which we have already used. Let us imagine the 
totality of unconscious recollections pressing against 
consciousness, — consciousness laying down the general 
rule that only what can serve action is allowed to pass. 
The memory of the present is striving like the rest; 
moreover, it is nearer to us than any other memory. 
Hanging on to our perception of the present, it is al- 
ways on the point of entering into it. Perception only 
escapes from it by a continual movement forward to 
keep itself in front. In other words, a memory can 
only be actualized by means of a perception : the mem- 
ory of the present would therefore penetrate into con- 
sciousness, could it insinuate itself into the perception 
of the present. But this is always in advance of it: 
thanks to the impulse which animates it, perception is 
less in the present than in the future. Suppose now 



1 84 MIND-ENERGY 

the impulse suddenly to stop: memory rejoins percep- 
tion, the present is cognized and recognized at the 
same time. 

False recognition seems then to be, upon the whole, 
the most harmless form of inattention to life. A con- 
stant lowering of tone of the fundamental attention is 
expressed outwardly by actual disorder or disease, more 
or less enduring, more or less severe. But it may 
happen that this attention is maintained ordinarily 
at its normal tone, and that its insufficiency is mani- 
fested in a quite different manner, namely by tem- 
porary arrests of functioning, generally very short, 
separated and far apart. As soon as the arrest occurs, 
false recognition overtakes consciousness, covers it for 
some instants and then falls back, like a wave. 

Let me conclude with a final hypothesis, at which 
I hinted in the beginning of this essay. If inattention 
to life can take two forms unequally severe, should we 
not be right in supposing that the more benign form 
is nature's means of preserving the individual from 
the more severe form? In cases when fundamental 
attention is insufficient and when, therefore, there is 
a perpetual risk of passing completely from the state 
of waking to the state of dream, consciousness localizes 
the evil at a few points where attention stops for a 
short time and resigns entirely: attention is thus made 
able, all the rest of the time, to remain steadily fixed 
on reality. Certain distinct cases of false recognition 



FALSE RECOGNITION 185 

appear to confirm this hypothesis. The patient begins 
by feeling himself detached from everything, as in a 
dream. He experiences false recognition immediately 
afterwards, as he begins to be self-possessed again. 45 
Such then seems to be the defect in will which 
occasions false recognition. Such, at least, seems to 
be its deep source and furthest origin. As for its 
actual cause and mechanism, it must be sought in the 
combined play of perception and memory. False 
recognition results from the natural functioning of 
these two faculties, each allowed its own way. It 
would take place at every moment if the will, unceas- 
ingly striving towards action, did not prevent the pres- 
ent turning back on itself by continually pressing it 
forward into the future. The darting forward of 
consciousness, which reveals the life-impetus, escapes 
analysis by its simplicity. We can however study, in 
the moments when it slackens, the conditions of mobile 
equilibrium which till then it had maintained, and so 
analyse a manifestation which foreshadows its es- 
sence. 

45 Sec especially the analysis of Kraepelin, also that of Dromard and 
Albes, art. cit. 



VI 

INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 
An Article in the "Revue Philosophique/' January, 1902. 

The problem with which I am going to deal is distinct 
from the problem of attention as it has been discussed 
by recent psychology. When we call to mind past 
deeds, interpret present actions, understand a dis- 
course, follow some one's train of thought, attend to 
our own thinking, whenever, in fact, our mind is 
occupied with a complex system of ideas, we feel we 
can take up two different attitudes, one of tension, 
the other of relaxation, and they are mainly distin- 
guished by the feeling of effort which is present in 
the one and absent from the other. Is the play of 
ideas the same in each case? Are the intellectual ele- 
ments of the same kind, and have they the same rela- 
tions among themselves? Does not the idea itself, 
do not the internal reactions it brings about, the form, 
movement and grouping of the simpler states which 
constitute it, provide the means of distinguishing the 
thinking which simply lets itself live from the thinking 
which concentrates itself in an effort? Indeed, in the 
feeling we have of this effort, does not the conscious- 

r86 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 187 

ness of a certain quite special movement of ideas count 
for something? These are the questions I have set 
myself to answer. They can all be summed up in ask- 
ing: What is the intellectual characteristic of intel- 
lectual effort? 

In whatever way we answer the question, we leave 
untouched the problem of attention as formulated in 
recent psychology. For psychologists have been 
mainly concerned with sensory attention, that is, the 
attention given to a simple perception. Now, as the 
simple perception accompanied by attention is a per- 
ception which would under favourable circumstances 
present the same content, or nearly so, if attention were 
not joined to it, it is outside this content that they have 
had to look for the specific character of attention. 
The idea, which Ribot suggested, of attributing de- 
cisive importance to the concomitant motor pheno- 
mena, and especially to actions of arrest, is likely to 
become classical in psychology. But, in proportion as 
a state of intellectual concentration is complicated, it 
becomes bound up with the effort which accompanies it. 
There are some mental works which cannot be con- 
ceived as performed with ease and facility. Could 
any one invent a new machine or even simply extract 
a square root without effort? The intellectual state, 
in such case, bears in some sort impressed upon it the 
mark of effort. This is as much as saying that there is 
here an intellectual characteristic of intellectual effort. 



188 MIND-ENERGY 

Now, if this character exists in ideas of a complex and 
superior order, there must be something of it to be 
discovered in the simpler states. It is not impossible, 
then, that we may discover traces of it even in sensory 
attention itself, although it probably becomes here an 
accessory and stands in the background. 

To simplify the study, I will examine the different 
kinds of intellectual work separately, starting with the 
easiest, which is reproduction, and ending with the 
most difficult, which is production or invention. Let 
us deal first then with the effort of memory, or more 
exactly with the effort of recollection. 

In Matter and Memory I showed that we must dis- 
tinguish a series of different " planes of consciousness," 
beginning with the plane of " pure memory " not yet 
translated into distinct images, and going down to the 
plane where the same memory is actualized in nascent 
sensations and incipient movements. The voluntary 
calling up of a memory consists, I said, in traversing 
these planes of consciousness one after another in a 
definite direction. At the same time that the book 
appeared (1896), Witasek published an interesting 
and suggestive article (in the Zeitschrift fur Psycho- 
logic, October 1896) in which the same mental work 
was defined as " a passage from the non-intuitive to 
the intuitive." Going back, then, to some points of 
my book, with the suggestion of Witasek's article, I 
will deal first, in the case of the recall of memories, 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 189 

with the difference between the spontaneous and the 
voluntary ideas. 

Speaking generally, whenever we learn a lesson by 
heart or try to fix a group of impressions in our 
memory, our one object is to retain what we learn. 
We do not trouble about what we shall have to do 
later in order to bring back to mind what we have 
learnt. The mechanism of the recall is indifferent 
to us; the essential thing is that we shall be able to 
evoke the memory, it matters not how, when we need 
it. This is why we use simultaneously or successively 
the most different processes, bringing our mechanical 
as well as our intellectual memory into play, juxta- 
posing between them auditive, visual and motor images 
and thus retaining them in their natural state, or 
else, on the contrary, substituting for them a simple 
idea which expresses their meaning and which enables 
us to reconstitute the series of them whenever we want 
to. And that is why, when the moment of recall 
comes, we recur neither to the reflective consciousness 
nor to the automatism exclusively, automatism and 
reflexion being so closely interwoven, image calling 
up image, while the mind is at work on less concrete 
ideas. Thence the extreme difficulty we experience 
in defining exactly the difference between the two at- 
titudes the mind takes when it recalls mechanically 
all the parts of a complex memory and when, on the 
contrary, it actively reconstructs them. There is al- 



iqo MIND-ENERGY 

most always partly mechanical recollection and partly 
intelligent reconstruction, and so completely mingled 
that we can never say where one begins and the other 
ends. However, some exceptional cases occur in which 
we set ourselves the task of learning a complicated 
lesson with the idea of its instantaneous and, so far as 
possible, mechanical recollection. On the other hand, 
there are cases in which we know that the lesson we 
are learning will never have to be recollected all at 
once, but that it must be the object of a slow and 
reflective reconstruction. Let us then first study these 
extreme cases. We shall see that we adopt quite dif- 
ferent methods of retention according to the kind of 
recall it is to be. On the other hand, the two different 
kinds of work which we accomplish, whilst acquiring 
a memory, in order that an intellectual effort for recal- 
ling it shall become possible or, on the contrary, shall 
be rendered useless, may throw some light on the 
nature and conditions of the effort. 

Robert Houdin, in a remarkable passage in 
Confidences, published in Paris, 1861 (vol. i. p. 8 f.), 
explains how he set about developing in his young son 
an intuitive and instantaneous memory. He began 
by showing the boy a domino, the five-four, asking 
him the total of the dots without letting him count 
them. He then set beside this domino another, the 
four-three, again requiring an immediate answer. This 
ended the first lesson. The next day he succeeded in 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 191 

making him add at a single glance three or four 
dominoes; the day after, five; and with each day's 
progress added more until he was able to obtain 
instantly at sight the sum of dots on any twelve 
dominoes. " When we had gained this result, we 
set to work on a task of a different kind of difficulty, 
and gave ourselves up to it for more than a month. 
My son and I passed fairly quickly before a shop of 
children's toys or before one furnished with different 
kinds of commodities, casting on it an attentive look. 
A few steps beyond, we took a pencil and paper from 
our pocket and tried separately which of us could 
write down the greater number of the objects we had 
noticed in passing. ... It often happened that my 
son would write down forty objects." The aim of this 
special education was to make the boy able to ap- 
prehend, in a single glance round an assembly-room, 
the objects which the individuals in the audience carried 
on their person. Then, with bandaged eyes, he simu- 
lated second-sight, describing on a conventional sign 
from his father an object chosen at random by one of 
the audience. This visual memory had developed to 
such a point that, after a few moments in front of a 
book-case, the boy would be able to retain a very great 
number of titles, with the exact place of the volumes. 
He took, as it were, a mental photograph of the whole, 
and this enabled him immediately to call up a direct 
recollection of the parts. But in the very first lesson, 



192 MIND-ENERGY. 

and particularly in not allowing the boy to add the dots 
of the dominoes, we may see the principal spring of 
this memory education. All interpretation of the 
visual image was excluded from the act of seeing. The 
mind was kept on the plane of visual images. 

To produce a memory habit of the same kind for 
the ear, we should have to leave the mind on the 
plane of auditive or articulatory images. Among the 
methods proposed for teaching languages, an import- 
ant one is that of Prendergast, 1 the principle of which 
has been more than once utilized. It consists in mak- 
ing the pupil begin by pronouncing sentences the mean- 
ing of which he is not allowed to ask, — never isolated 
words, always complete propositions which he must 
repeat mechanically. If the pupil tries to guess the 
meaning, he spoils the result. If he hesitates for a 
moment, it has all to begin again. By varying the 
place of the words, by practising exchange of words 
among the sentences, it comes about that the meaning 
is caught of itself by the ear in some fashion without 
the understanding being mixed with it. The object is 
to obtain from memory an instantaneous and easy re- 
call, and the contrivance consists in making the mind 
move as much as possible among images of sounds or 
articulations without the more abstract elements, ex- 
ternal to the plane of sensations and movements, in- 
tervening. 

1 Prendergast, Thomas, The Mastery Series (London, 1868.) 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 193 

The facility of recall of a complex memory seems, 
then, to be in direct proportion to the tendency of its 
elements to spread themselves out on one and the 
same plane of consciousness. Each of us can verify 
this for himself. Suppose a verse of poetry learnt in 
our school-days to have remained fixed in our memory. 
We perceive, in reciting it, that word calls up word, 
and that reflexion on the meaning hinders rather than 
helps the mechanism of recall. Memories, in such 
case, may be auditive or visual, but they are always 
at the same time motor. Indeed, it is difficult for 
us to distigunish between what is ear memory and 
what is habit of articulating. If we stop in the middle 
of the recitation, our feeling of " incompleteness " ap- 
pears to consist sometimes in the fact that the re- 
mainder of the verse goes singing on in our memory, 
sometimes in the fact that the movement of articula- 
tion has not got to the end of its push and wants to 
complete it; sometimes, and more often, it is both at 
the same time. But we must notice that these two 
groups of memories, — auditive memories and motor 
memories, — are of the same order, equally concrete, 
equally near to sensation. They are, to use the expres- 
sion already employed, on one and the same " plane of 



consciousness." 



If, on the contrary, recall is accompanied by an 
effort, the mind is sure to be seen moving from one 
plane to another. 



i 9 4 MIND-ENERGY 

How, indeed, do we learn by heart when it is not 
instantaneous recall we have in view? Treatises on 
mnemonics tell us, but each of us can discover it for 
himself. We read the piece attentively, then we divide 
it into paragraphs or sections, paying particular atten- 
tion to its internal organization. In this way we ob- 
tain a schematic view of the whole. Then we insert 
into the scheme the most noticeable expressions. To 
the dominant idea we attach the subordinate ideas, to 
the subordinate ideas the dominating and representa- 
tive words, and lastly to these words the intermediate 
words which bind them together as in a chain. " The 
art of mnemonics consists in seizing in a passage of 
prose the salient ideas, the short sentences, the simple 
words which involve with them whole pages," 2 so one 
treatise expresses it. Another gives the following 
rule: "Reduce into short and substantial formulae, 
. . . note in each formula the suggestive word, . . . 
associate all these words together and form in this way 
a logical chain of ideas." s Here, then, we no more 
attach together mechanically images to images, each 
intended to bring back that which comes after it; we 
jump to a point where the multiplicity of the images 
seems to be condensed into a single, simple and un- 
divided idea. It is this idea we commit to memory. 
Then, when the moment of recall comes, we redescend 

2 Audibert, Traite de mnimotechnie genirale (Paris 1840), p. 173. 
8 Andre, Mnimotchnie rationnelle (Angers, 1894). 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 195 

from the top of the pyramid towards the base. We 
pass from the higher plane, in which all was gathered 
up into a single idea, to lower and lower planes, nearer 
and nearer to sensation, where the simple idea is dis- 
persed in images, and where the images develop into 
sentences and words. But, then, recollection is no 
longer immediate and easy. It is accompanied by ef- 
fort. 

In this second method more time no doubt is re- 
quired for recollecting, but less time is spent in learn- 
ing. The perfecting of memory, it has very often been 
said, is not so much an increase of retentivity as a 
greater skill in sub-dividing, co-ordinating and en- 
chaining ideas. The preacher quoted by William 
James (Principles of Psychology, i 668) says: " Before 
twenty, it took three or four days to commit an hour- 
long sermon; after twenty, two days, one day, half a' 
day; and now one slow, analytic, very attentive or 
adhesive reading does it." The progress here is evi- 
dently only a growing aptitude to make all the ideas, 
all the images, all the words converge on one single 
point. It is getting hold of the gold coin, instead of 
having the silver or copper change for it. 

What is the gold coin? How are so many different 
images held together implicitly in one simple idea? 
I shall have to come back to this point. Let me first 
suggest a term by which to characterize the simpler 
idea which is able to develop into multiple images. 



i 9 6 MIND-ENERGY 

Let me say, borrowing from the Greek, that it is a 
dynamic scheme. I mean by this, that the idea does 
not contain the images themselves so much as the in- 
dication of what we must do to reconstruct them. It 
is not an extract of the images, got by improverishing 
each of them; if it were, I should not understand why 
the scheme enables us, as it does in so many cases, to 
recover the images integrally. It is not either- — 
or at least it is not only — the abstract idea of what 
all the images, taken together, mean. Doubtless the 
idea of the meaning has a large place in it; but, be- 
sides being difficult to say what this idea of the mean- 
ing of the images becomes when we detach it com- 
pletely from the images themselves, it is clear that the 
same logical meaning may belong to quite different 
series of images, and that consequently it would not be 
enough to make us retain and reconstruct one definite 
series of images to the exclusion of others. The 
scheme is something not easy to define, but of which 
each of us has the feeling and of which we shall un- 
derstand the nature if we compare with one another 
different kinds of memories, especially technical or pro- 
fessional memories. I will not enter here into detail. 
I will, however, call attention to a kind of memory 
which in recent years has been the object of specially 
careful investigation — the memory of chess-players. 4 

*Binet, Psyckologie des grands calculateurs et joueurs d'echecs 
(Paris, 1894). 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 197 

A skilful chess-player may be able to play several 
games at once without looking at the chess-boards. 
At each move of one of his opponents, the new posi- 
tion of the piece moved is indicated to the player. He 
then moves a piece on his side, and thus, playing 
blindly, picturing mentally at each moment the respec- 
tive positions of all the pieces on all the chess-boards, 
he is able to win, often against good players, games 
simultaneously played. Ta'ine, in a well-known pas- 
sage in L' Intelligence (vol. i. p. 81), has given a theory 
of the way the feat is performed: he derived it from 
indications furnished by a player, one of his own 
friends. According to this theory, the player uses 
here a purely visual memory. He perceives continu- 
ously, " as in an inner mirror/' the image of each of 
the chess-boards with its pieces as it appears with each 
new move. 

Alfred Binet, however, investigated the mental pro- 
cedure in the case of a number of blindfold players, 
and reached a quite definite and entirely different 
conclusion. The image of the chess-board with its 
pieces is not presented to the memory, clean cut and 
ready made, " as in a mirror," but at every move 
in the games the player has to make an effort of 
reconstruction. What is that effort? What are the 
elements actually present in the memory? On this 
point the investigation yielded unexpected results. 
The players all agreed that a mental vision of the pieces 



198 MIND-ENERGY 

themselves would be more disturbing to them than 
useful. What they keep in mind is not the external 
aspect of each piece, but its power, its bearing and its 
value, in fact its function. A bishop is not a piece 
of wood of more or less fantastic shape: it is an 
"oblique force." The castle is a certain power of 
" going in a straight line." The knight, a piece 
" which is almost equal to three pawns and which 
moves according to a quite special law," and so on. 
So much for the pieces. Now for the game. What 
is present to the mind of the player is a composition of 
forces, or rather a relation between allied or hostile 
powers. The player remarkes mentally the history of 
the game from the beginning. He reconstitutes the 
successive events which have brought about the 
present situation. He thus obtains an idea of the 
whole which enables him at any moment to visualize 
the elements. That abstract idea is moreover one. 
It implies reciprocal penetration of all the elements 
in one another. What proves it is that each game 
appears to the player with a character entirely its own. 
It gives him an impression sui generis. " I grasp it 
as a musician grasps a chord," so one of the players 
described it. And it is just this difference of phy- 
siognomical expression, so to say, which enables the 
player to keep several games in mind without con- 
fusing them. So then, here again, there is an ideal 
scheme of the whole, and this scheme is neither an 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 199 

extract nor a summary. It is as complete as the image 
will be when called up, but it contains, in the estate 
of reciprocal implication, what the image will evolve 
into parts external to one another. 

Analyse your effort when you find difficulty in evok- 
ing a simple memory. You start with an idea in which 
you feel there are very different dynamical elements 
implied in one another. This reciprocal implication, 
and consequent internal complication, is so necessary, 
it is so much the essence of the schematic idea, that 
if it be just a simple image you are trying to evoke, 
the scheme may not be nearly so simple. I need not 
go far for an illustration. Some time ago, when 
jotting down the plan of the present article and noting 
the list of works to consult, I wanted to include the 
name of Prendergast, the author whose intuitive method 
I have spoken of and whose articles on memory, 
among others, I had previously read. But I could 
not think of this name, nor recollect the work in which 
I had first seen it. I remember pretty well the phases 
of the work by which I tried to evoke the recalcitrant 
name. I started with the general impression which 
I had of it. It was an impression of strangeness, but 
not of strangeness in general, — rather of a certain 
definite kind of strangeness. There was, as it were, 
a dominant note of barbarism, rapine, the feeling that 
would have been left on one by the sight of a bird of 
prey pouncing on its victim, gripping it in its claws, 



200 MIND-ENERGY 

carrying it off. I now say to myself that the word 
" prendre " (snatch), which was almost figured by the 
two first syllables of the name I was trying to think of, 
must have had a large share in my impression. But I 
do not know if this resemblance would have been 
enough to determine a shade of feeling so precise, and 
in seeing with what obstinacy the name of " Arbo- 
gaste " comes up today to my mind when I think of 
" Prendergast," I ask myself whether perhaps I had 
not blended together the general idea of " prendre " 
and the name of " Arbogaste." This name, which 
goes back to the time when I learned Roman History, 
evoked in my memory vague images of barbarism. I 
am not sure, however, and all I can affirm is that the 
impression left on my mind was absolutely sui generis, 
and that it tended, in spite of innumerable difficulties, 
to transform itself into a proper name. It was es- 
pecially the letters d and r which were brought back 
to my memory by that impression. But they were not 
brought back as visual or auditive images, or even as 
ready-formed motor images. They presented them- 
selves especially as indicating a certain direction of 
effort to follow in order to get at the articulation of 
the name I was trying to think of. It seemed to me, 
— wrongly moreover, — that these letters must be the 
first letters of the word, just because they had the 
appearance of pointing out to me a road. I said to 
myself that in trying with them the different vowels by 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 201 

turn, I should succeed in pronouncing the first syllable, 
and so get an impetus which would carry me all along 
the actual word. Would such a work have ended suc- 
cessfully? I do not know, for it had not gone very 
far when suddenly it came into my mind that the name 
occurred in a note of a book by Kay on the education 
of memory, and that it was there, moreover, that 
I had become acquainted with it. It is there that I 
went at once to find it. Perhaps the sudden resurrec- 
tion of the useful memory was the effect of chance; 
but perhaps also the work which was destined to con- 
vert the scheme into an image had passed beyond its 
end, evoking, instead of the image itself, the circum- 
stances which had originally enframed it. 

In these examples, the effort of memory appears' 
to have as its essence the evolving of a scheme, if 
not simple at least concentrated, into an image with 
distinct elements more or less independent of one 
another. When we let our memory wander at will 
without effort, images succeed images, all situated on 
one and the same plane of consciousness. On the 
other hand, when we make an effort to recollect, it 
seems that we are concentrating on a higher plane in 
order to descend progressively towards the images we 
want to evoke. If, in the first case, associating images 
with images, we move on a single plane with a move- 
ment which I will call horizontal, then in the second 
case we must say that the movement is vertical and 



202 MIND-ENERGY 

that it makes us pass from one plane to another. In 
the first case, the images are homogeneous among 
themselves, but the objects represented by the images 
are different; in the second, there is but one identical 
object throughout all stages of the operation, but it is 
represented differently, — I mean represented by 
heterogeneous intellectual states, sometimes schemes 
and sometimes images, the scheme striving towards 
the image in proportion as the descending movement 
is accentuated. In short, each of us has the very dis- 
tinct feeling of an operation which is carried out in 
extension and superficially in the one case, in intensity 
and in depth on the other. 

It is rare, moreover, that the two operations are 
perfectly distinct, pure and unalloyed. Most acts of 
recollection are at the same time a descent of the 
scheme towards the image, and a moving of the mind 
among the images themselves. This amounts to say- 
ing, as I indicated at the beginning of this study, that 
an act of memory ordinarily includes a part which is 
effort and a part which is automatism. I am thinking 
at this moment of a long journey which I made some 
years ago. The incidents of the journey come to my 
mind in no particular order, one mechanically calls up 
others. But if I make an effort to remember a par- 
ticular period, then I go from the whole of the period 
to the parts which compose it, the whole appearing to 
me at first as an individual scheme, having its particular 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 203 

affective colour and tone. Often, too, the images 
which have been simply called up one after another in 
my mind bid me go to the scheme to complete them. 
But whenever I have the feeling of effort, I find my- 
self travelling from the scheme to the image. 

So far, then, we may conclude that the effort of re- 
call consists in converting a schematic idea, whose ele- 
ments interpenetrate, into an imaged idea, the parts of 
which are juxtaposed. 

We must now study the effort of intellection in gen- 
eral, the effort we have to put forth in order to com- 
prehend and interpret. I will confine myself here to 
a few hints, referring for the rest to my former work 
{Matter and Memory, pp. 89-141). 

Intellection is continually going on; it is not easy, 
therefore, to say where intellectual effort begins and 
where it ends. All the same, there is a certain kind 
of understanding and interpreting which works with- 
out effort, while there is another kind which, though 
not necessarily implying effort, is generally to be found 
when an effort is being made. 

Intellection of the first kind consists, when con- 
fronted with a perception, in responding automatically 
by an appropriate act. What is recognizing an or- 
dinary object, if not knowing how to use it? And 
what is " knowing how to use " but, when we have 
a perception, sketching mechanically the action which 



2o 4 MIND-ENERGY 

custom has associated with it? The first observers of 
psychical blindness gave it the name of apraxia, ex- 
pressing thereby that inaptitude in recognizing ordi- 
nary objects is above all inability to use them. 5 This 
completely automatic intellection extends much farther 
than we imagine. Current conversation is composed 
in great part of ready-made responses to conventional 
questions, the response succeeding the question with- 
out intelligence being interested in the meaning of 
either. Thus, patients in a state of dementia can 
keep up an almost coherent conversation on a simple 
subject, although they hardly know what they are say- 
ing. 6 We sometimes find ourselves stringing words 
together, guiding ourselves as it were by the compati- 
bility or incompatibility of their musical sound, and 
so forming correct sentences without our intelligence 
being concerned in the matter at all. In such cases, 
the interpretation of sensations is made at once by 
movements. The mind remains on one and the same 
" plane of consciousness. " 

Quite different is true intellection. It consists in a 
movement of the mind continually coming and going 
between perceptions or images, on the one hand, and 

5 Kussmaul, Die Storungen der Sprache; Allen Starr, "Apraxia and 
Aphasia," Medical Record (Oct. 1888). Cf Laquer, Neurologisches 
Centralblatt (June 1888) ; Nodet, Les Agnoscies (Paris, 1899) ; and 
Claparede, "Revue generale sur l'Agnoscie," Annee psychologique 
(1900), vi. pp. 85 ff. 

c Robertson, "Reflex Speech," Journal of Mental Science (April 
1888) ; Fere, "Le Langage reflexe," Revue philosophique (Jan. 1896). 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 205 

their meaning, on the other. What is the essential 
direction of this movement? We might suppose 
that in this case we start with images and proceed to 
the discovery of their meaning, because there are some 
images which are given first of all and because " un- 
derstanding " consists in interpreting perceptions or 
images. Whether we are following an argument, 
reading a book or listening to a discourse, there are 
always perceptions or images which are presented to 
the mind for it to translate into relations, as though it 
must go from the concrete to the abstract. But this 
is no more than an appearance, and it is easy to see 
that in fact the mind does the exact opposite in the 
work of interpretation. 

It is evident in the case of mathematical calculation. 
Can we follow a calculation except by going over it 
on our own account? Do we understand the solution 
of a problem except by solving the problem in our 
turn? The calculation is exposed on the black-board, 
the solution is printed or explained viva voce; but 
the figures and signs we see are only finger-posts to 
which we refer to ensure that we are not on the wrong 
road; the sentences that we read or hear have a com- 
plete meaning only when we are able to make them 
up ourselves, to create them anew, so to say, by draw- 
ing from ourselves the expression of the mathematical 
truth which they teach. All along the argument that 
we are hearing or reading we catch a few hints, choose 



2o6 MIND-ENERGY 

a few guiding marks. From these visual or auditive 
images we jump to abstract ideas of relation. Then, 
setting out from these ideas, we evolve them into 
imagined words which coalesce with the words we are 
reading or hearing. 

Now, is it not the same with any work of interpre- 
tation whatsoever? We argue sometimes as though 
reading and listening consisted in using the words 
seen or heard as spring-boards from each of which we 
jump to the corresponding idea, and then set the ideas 
side by side. The experimental study of reading and 
of hearing words shows us that what happens is quite 
different. In the first place, in current reading all 
that we see of a word amounts to a very small matter, 
a letter or two — less than that even, a few strokes or 
characteristic features. The experiments of Cattell, 
Goldscheider and Miiller, Pillsbury (criticized, it is 
true, by Erdmann and Dodge) seem to be conclusive 
on this point. No less instructive are Bagley's ex- 
periments on the hearing of speech; they completely 
confirm the fact that what we hear is only a part of the 
words pronounced. But, apart from any scientific 
experiment, every one knows the impossibility of per- 
ceiving distinctly the words of a foreign language with 
which one is unfamiliar. The fact is that mere vision 
and hearing are limited in such case to furnishing us 
with guiding marks, or rather to drawing an outline 
which we fill in with memories. It is a great mistake, 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 207 

when describing here the mechanism of recognition, to 
suppose that we begin by seeing and hearing, and that 
afterwards, having got the perception, we go looking 
for a memory like it in order to recognize it. The 
fact is that it is the memory which makes us see and 
hear, and the perception is incapable by itself of evok- 
ing the memory which resembles it, because, to do that, 
it must have already taken form and itself be com- 
plete; now, it only becomes complete and acquires a 
distinct form through that very memory, which slips 
into it and supplies most of its content. If this be so, 
then, it must be the meaning , before everything, which 
guides us in the reconstruction of forms and sounds. 
What we see of the sentence read, what we hear of 
the sentence spoken, is only what is necessary to place 
us in the corresponding class of ideas. Then, setting 
out from ideas, — that is to say, from abstract rela- 
tions, — we materialize them imaginatively in hypo- 
thetical words which try whether they can cover ex- 
actly what we see and hear. Interpretation is there- 
fore, in reality, a reconstruction. A slight contact 
with the images actually perceived throws abstract 
thinking into a definite direction. The abstract 
thought then develops into complete images, merely 
represented, which in their turn come and touch the 
perceived images, follow them as they go along, en- 
deavour to coalesce with them. Where coincidence 
is perfect, the perception is perfectly interpreted. 



208 MIND-ENERGY 

This work of interpretation is too rapid, when we 
hear our own language, to allow us time to decompose 
it into its different phases. But we have the clear 
consciousness of it when we converse in a foreign 
language which we know only imperfectly. We re- 
alize, then, that the sounds distinctly heard are being 
used by us as guiding marks, that we jump at once 
to a certain class of abstract ideas, and that, when we 
have adopted this intellectual tone, we advance with 
the conceived meaning, to meet the perceived sound. 
If the interpretation is to be exact, the one must be 
able to join the other. 

Indeed, would interpretation be possible if we had 
to go from words to ideas? The words of a sentence 
have not an absolute meaning. Each of them borrows 
a special import from what precedes it and from what 
follows it. Nor are all the words of a sentence capa- 
ble of evoking an independent image or idea. Many 
of them express relations, and express them only by 
their place in the whole and by their connexion with 
the other words of the sentence. Had the mind con- 
stantly to go from the word to the idea, it would be 
always perplexed and, so to say, wandering. Intellec- 
tion can only be straight and sure if we set out from the 
supposed meaning, constructed by us hypothetically, 
then descend from the meaning to the fragments of 
words really perceived, and then make use of these as 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 209 

simple stakes to peg out in all its sinuosities the special 
curve of the road which the mind is to follow. 

I cannot deal with the problem of sensory atten- 
tion, but I think that voluntary attention, — attention 
which is or may be accompanied by a feeling of effort, 
— differs precisely here from mechanical attention in 
this, that it puts in operation psychical elements situated 
on different planes of consciousness. When we pay 
attention mechanically, certain movements and atti- 
tudes favourable to distinct perception respond to the 
appeal of confused perception. But it does not seem 
that there is ever voluntary attention without a " pre- 
perception," to use the word proposed by G. H. 
Lewes, 7 that is to say, without an idea, which may be an 
anticipated image, or even something more abstract, — 
for instance, a hypothesis relative to the meaning of 
what we are about to perceive and the probable relation 
of that perception to certain elements of our past ex- 
perience. There has been much dispute as to the true 
nature of the oscillation of attention. Some hold that 
the phenomenon has a central, others that it has a 
peripheral, origin. But, even if we do not wholly 
accept the central origin theory, we must admit that 
there can be no attention without a certain eccentric 
projection of images which descend towards percep- 

7 G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind (London, 1879), vol. iii. 
p. 106. 



210 MIND-ENERGY 

tion. Only in this way can we explain the effect of 
attention, whether it be to intensify the image, as some 
writers maintain, or only, as others think, to render it 
clearer and more distinct. Would it be possible to 
understand the gradual enrichment of perception by 
attention if the bare perception were more than a 
mere hint, an appeal mainly addressed to memory? 
The bare perception of the parts suggests a schematic 
idea of the whole, and thereby of the relations of the 
parts to one another. Developing this scheme into 
memory-images, we try to make these memory-images 
coincide with the images perceived. If we do not 
succeed, straight we go to some other idea, some other 
scheme, from which we shall also gradually descend. 
Here, again, the positive, useful part of the work is 
the going from the scheme to the image perceived. 

The intellectual effort to interpret, to comprehend, 
to pay attention, is then a movement of the " dynamic 
scheme " in the direction of the image which develops 
it. It is a continuous transformation of abstract re- 
lations, suggested by the objects perceived, into con- 
crete images capable of recovering those objects. No 
doubt a feeling of effort does not always intervene 
during this operation. We shall see presently in what 
particular circumstances the operation takes place 
whenever an effort is to be found accompanying it. 
But it is only during such an operation that we can 
become conscious of an intellectual effort. The feeU 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT an 

ing of effort, in intellection, is produced on the passage 
from the scheme to the image. 

I have now to verify this law in the case of the 
highest forms of intellectual effort — I mean in the 
effort of invention. As Ribot has observed, to create 
imaginatively is to solve a problem. 8 Now, what other 
way is there of solving a problem than by supposing 
it already solved? We set before ourselves, as Ribot 
says, a certain ideal, that is, we present to our mind 
a certain effect as already obtained, and then we seek 
to discover by what composition of elements we can 
obtain it. We pass at a bound to the complete result, 
to the end we want to realize, and the whole effort of 
invention is then an attempt to fill up the gap over 
which we have leapt, and to reach anew that same 
end by following, this time, the continuous thread of 
the means which will realize. But how is it possible 
to know the end without the means, the whole without 
the parts? We cannot know this end or whole under 
the form of an image, because an image which would 
make us see the effect being brought about would show 
us, within the image itself, the means by which the 
effect is obtained. It must necessarily be assumed, 
then, that the whole is presented as a scheme, and that 
invention consists precisely in converting the scheme 
into image. 

8 Ribot, Ulmagination creatrke (Paris, 1900), p. 130. 



212 MIND-ENERGY 

The inventor who wishes to construct a certain ma- 
chine forms an idea of the work it is to do. The 
abstract form of this work evokes successively in his 
mind, by means of tentative experiments, the concrete 
form of the different elementary movements which will 
realize the total movement, then the parts and com- 
binations of parts of the machine which will produce 
these elementary movements. It is precisely at this 
moment that the invention takes form: the schematic 
idea has become an imaged idea. The author writing 
a novel, the dramatist creating his characters and situa- 
tions, the musician composing a symphony, the poet 
composing an epic, all have in mind, first of all, some- 
thing simple and abstract, something, so to say, in- 
corporeal. For the musician and poet it is a new im- 
pression, which they must unfold in sounds or in 
imagery. For the novelist and the dramatist it is a 
theme to be developed into events, a feeling, individual 
or social, to be materialized in living personages. 
They start work with a scheme of the whole, and the 
end is obtained when they reach a distinct image of 
the elements. M. Paulhan has shown by some highly 
interesting examples how literary and poetic invention 
thus proceeds " from the abstract to the concrete " ; 
that is to say, from the whole to the parts, from the 
scheme to the image. 9 

We must not believe, however, that the scheme 

9 Paulhan, Psychologie de Vinvention (Paris, 1901), ch. iv. 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 213 

remains unchanged throughout the operation. It is 
modified by the very images by which it endeavours to 
be filled in. Sometimes there remains nothing of the 
primitive scheme in the final image. The inventor, 
whilst working out the details of his machine, finds 
himself continually giving up some part of what he 
wanted or getting it to do something else. The char- 
acters which the poet or the novelist creates are always 
reacting on the idea or the feeling which they are 
intended to express. In this especially is the part of 
the unforeseen; it is, we might say, in the movement 
by which the image turns round towards the scheme 
in order to modify or transform it. But effort, in the 
strict meaning of the word, is only to be found on the 
way from the scheme, whether unchanged or changing, 
to the images which will fill it in. 

Nor is it necessary that the scheme should always 
explicitly precede the image. Ribot has shown that 
we must distinguish two forms of creative imagination 
— one intuitive, the other reflective. " The first pro- 
ceeds from the unity to the details . . . the second 
goes from the details to the unity vaguely apprehended. 
It begins with a fragment which lures it on, and is 
gradually completed. . . . Kepler spent part of his 
life in trying to work out extravagant hypotheses until 
one day, discovering the elliptical orbit of Mars, all 
his former work took shape and organized itself into 
a system. " In other words, in place of a single 



2i 4 MIND-ENERGY 

scheme with fixed and rigid lines, given to us immedi- 
ately in a distinct concept, we may have an elastic or 
mobile scheme the contours of which our mind will 
not fix, because it will get the suggestion of the definite 
shape from the very images which the scheme is calling 
up in order to be embodied in them. But, fixed or 
mobile, it is while the scheme is developing into images 
that there arises the feeling of intellectual effort. 

Bringing these arguments into line with the former, 
we get a formula of intellectual work — that is, of the 
movement of the mind which can, in certain cases, be 
accompanied by a feeling of effort. To work intel- 
lectually is to take one and the same idea and lead it 
through different planes of consciousness, in a direction 
which goes from the abstract to the concrete, from the 
scheme to the image. What we now have to ascertain 
is in what special cases this movement of the mind 
(which perhaps always includes a feeling of effort, 
though often so slight or so familiar that it is not 
distinctly perceived), gives us the clear consciousness 
of an intellectual effort. 

To this question simple common sense replies that 
there is effort, in addition to work, when the work is 
difficult. But by what sign do we recognize the diffi- 
culty of the work? By the fact that the work does 
not u go of itself," that it meets with a hindrance or 
an obstacle, or that it takes more time than we should 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 215 

wish to give in order to attain the end. Effort means 
that there is a slowing and holding back. On the 
other hand, we may install ourselves in the scheme 
and wait indefinitely for the image, or we may slacken 
the work indefinitely, without any consciousness of an 
effort. It must then be on the way in which our wait- 
ing-time is filled that the feeling of effort depends, 
that is to say, on the quite special diversity of states 
which follow one another in the waiting-time. What 
are those states ? I have just said that there is a move- 
ment from the scheme to the images, and that the 
mind is at work only when converting the scheme into 
images. The states which follow one another must 
therefore correspond to so many trial efforts of the 
images to get inserted in the scheme, or again, in 
certain cases at least, to so many modifications under- 
gone by the scheme in order to get itself translated into 
images. In this peculiar kind of hesitation is likely 
to be found the characteristic of intellectual effort. 

I cannot do better than reproduce here, adapting 
it to my present purpose, an interesting and profound 
idea put forward by Professor Dewey in his article 
on the psychology of effort. 10 There is effort, accord- 
ing to Professor Dewey, whenever we use acquired 
habits to learn a new exercise. In particular, in the 
case of bodily exercise, we can only learn it by utilizing 

10 Dewey, "The Psychology of Effort," Philosophical Review (Jan. 
i897). 



216 MIND-ENERGY 

or modifying movements to which we are already ac- 
customed. But the old habit is still there, and it re- 
sists the new habit we wish to set up by means of it. 
Effort simply exhibits this struggle of two habits at 
once different and alike. 

Let me express this same idea in terms of schemes 
and images. I will apply my formula to bodily ef- 
fort of the kind which Dewey has in mind, and see 
whether bodily and intellectual effort do not throw 
light on one another. 

When we want to learn, unaided, a complex exercise 
such as dancing, how do we set about it? We begin 
by looking at people dancing. In this way we get a 
visual perception, say, of the waltz-movement, if that 
be what we are wanting to learn. This perception 
we confide to our memory, and our aim, then, is to 
get our limbs to perform movements which will give 
our eyes an impression like that which we remember 
having seen. But what is that impression? Can we 
say that it is the clear, definitive, perfect image of 
the waltz-movement? That would imply that we can 
perceive exactly the movement of the waltz when we 
do not know how to waltz. Now it is quite clear that 
if, in order to learn the dance, we must begin by seeing 
it danced, on the other hand we can only see it, in its 
details and even as a whole, when we have learnt to 
some extent to dance it. The image which we are 
going to use is not, then, a clean-cut visual image ; it is 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 217 

not clean cut, because it is to vary and grow precise 
in the course of the learning which it is its business to 
direct; neither is it entirely visual, because, if it be- 
comes perfected in the course of the learning, — that 
is to say, in the course of our acquiring the appropriate 
motor images — the reason is that these motor im- 
ages, called up by the visual image, but more precise 
than the visual image, invade it and gradually take its 
place. In fact, the useful part of the image is neither 
purely visual nor purely motor; it is both at once, being 
the outline of the relations, especially temporal, be- 
tween the successive parts of the movement to be 
executed. An image of this kind, which exhibits re- 
lations rather than things, is very like what I have 
called a scheme. 

Now, we only begin to know how to dance when 
this scheme, supposed complete, has obtained from our 
body the successive movements the model of which 
it set before us. In other words, the scheme, an idea 
more and more abstract of the movement to be carried 
out, must fill itself with all the motor sensations which 
correspond to the movement being carried out. This 
it can only do by evoking one by one the ideas of 
these sensations or, in the words of Bastian the 
11 kinaesthetic images," of the partial, elementary 
movements composing the total movement: these 
memories of motor sensations, to the extent that they 
are revivified, are converted into actual motor sensa- 



2i 8 MIND-ENERGY 

tions, and consequently into movements actually accom- 
plished. Of these motor images, then, we must have 
been already possessed. So it comes to this : in order 
to contract the habit of a complex movement like the 
waltz, we must already have the habit of the element- 
ary movements into which the waltz can be decom- 
posed. In fact, it is easy to see that the movements 
to which we resort for walking, for raising ourselves 
on the point of the toes, for turning round, are just 
those which we utilize in order to learn how to waltz. 
But we do no utilize them exactly as they are. It is 
necessary to modify them more or less, to inflect each 
of them with the general direction of the waltz-move- 
ment, and especially to combine them together in a 
new manner. There is, then, on the one hand, the 
schematic idea of the total movement which is new, 
and, on the other hand, the kinaesthetic images of 
some old movements, identical or analogous to the ele- 
mentary movements into which the total movement has 
been analysed. Learning the waltz consists in getting 
from these different kinaesthetic images, already old, 
a new systematization which will allow all of them 
together to be inserted in the scheme. Here again, 
then, we have to do with the developing of a scheme 
into images. But the old grouping struggles against 
the new grouping. The habit of walking, for ex- 
ample, interferes with the attempt to dance. The 
total kinaesthetic image of walking prevents us from 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 219 

getting at once the elementary kinaesthetic images of 
walking to combine with others and form the total 
kinaesthetic image of the dance. The scheme of the 
dance does not succeed right away in filling itself with 
appropriate images. Does not this delay, caused by 
the necessity in which the scheme finds itself of bring- 
ing gradually the manifold elementary images to a 
new modus vivendi among themselves, caused also, in 
many cases, by modifications which the scheme itself 
undergoes in order to become capable of developing 
into images — this delay sui generis made up of tenta- 
tives, of more or less fruitful trials, adapting images 
to the scheme and the scheme to images, letting the 
ideas interact and intermingle — does not this delay 
measure the interval between the difficult attempt and 
the easy execution, between the learning and the doing 
of the exercise? 

Now, it is easy to see that the same kind of process 
occurs in every effort to learn and to understand, in all 
intellectual effort. Consider the effort of memory. I 
have endeavoured to show. that it is produced in the 
transition from the scheme to the image. But there 
are cases where the development of the scheme into 
the image is immediate, because one image alone pres- 
ents itself to perform that duty. And there are other 
cases where many images, analogous to one another, 
present themselves concurrently. In general, when 
several different images are competitors, it means that 



220 MIND-ENERGY 

none of them entirely fulfils the conditions laid down 
by the scheme. And that is why, in such case, the 
scheme may have to modify itself in order to obtain 
development into images. Thus, when I want to 
recall a proper name, I turn first to the general im- 
pression which I have kept of it; this is what will act 
as the " dynamic scheme." At once different ele- 
mentary images, corresponding, for example, to cer- 
tain letters of the alphabet, present themselves to 
my mind. These letters seek either to form a whole 
together or to substitute themselves for one another, 
in any way to organize themselves according to the 
indications of the scheme. But often, in the course 
of the work, there is revealed the impossibility of 
reaching any form of living organization. Hence a 
gradual modification of the scheme — a modification 
required by the very images which the scheme has 
aroused and which may yet indeed have to be trans- 
formed or even to disappear in their turn. But 
whether the images simply manage it between them- 
selves or whether scheme and images have to make 
reciprocal concessions to one another, the effort of 
recall always implies an interval, gradually filled in 
or diminished, between the scheme and the images. 
The more this bringing together needs goings and 
comings, oscillations, struggle and negotiation, the 
more the feeling of effort is accentuated. 

Nowhere is this work so visible as in the effort of 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 221 

invention. Here we have the distinct feeling of a form 
of organization, variable no doubt, but anterior to the 
elements which must be organized, then of a competi- 
tion between the elements themselves, and lastly, if 
we succeed in inventing, of an equilibrium which is a 
reciprocal adaptation of the form and of the matter. 
The scheme varies from one of these periods to the 
other; but in each of the periods it remains relatively 
unchanged, and it is the business of the images to 
fit into it. It is just as though we had to stretch a 
piece of Indiarubber in different directions at the same 
time in order to bring it to the geometrical form of a 
particular polygon. It shrinks at some points, accord- 
ing as it is lengthened at others. We have to begin 
over and over again, each time fixing the partial result 
obtained; we may even have, during the operation, to 
modify the form first assigned to the polygon. So is 
it with the effort of invention, whether it take seconds 
or whether it require years. 

Now, does this coming and going between the 
scheme and the images, this play of the images agree- 
ing or quarrelling among themselves to enter the 
scheme, in short, does this particular movement of 
ideas form an integral part of the feeling that we have 
of effort? If this play of images is present whenever 
we experience the feeling of intellectual effort, if it is 
absent when that feeling is absent, can we think that 
it has nothing to do with the feeling itself? But then, 



222 MIND-ENERGY 

on the other hand, how can a play of images, a move- 
ment of ideas, enter into the composition of a feeling? 
Recent psychology inclines to resolve into peripheral 
sensations whatever is affective in affection. And even 
if we do not go so far, still it seems that affection 
is irreducible to ideation. What, then, is exactly the 
relation between the affective tone which colours all 
intellectual effort and the very special play of ideas 
which analysis discovers in it? 

I am quite ready to grant that in attention, in 
reflexion and generally in intellectual effort, the affec- 
tion experienced can be resolved into peripheral sensa- 
tions. But it does not therefore follow that the 
" play of ideas " I have indicated as characteristic of 
intellectual effort does not also make itself felt in that 
affection. We can agree to both, if only we assume 
that the play of sensations responds to the play of ideas 
and is an echo of it, so to say, in another tone. That 
is the easier to understand inasmuch as we are not in 
fact dealing here with an idea, but with a movement of 
ideas, with a struggle or with an interference of ideas 
with one another. We may conceive that these mental 
oscillations have their sensory harmonics. We may 
conceive that this indecision of the mind is continued 
in. a disquietude of the body. The characteristic sen- 
sations of intellectual effort are likely to express that 
very suspension and disquietude. In a general way, 
may we not say that the peripheral sensations which 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 223 

analysis discovers in an emotion are always more or 
less symbolical of the ideas to which that emotion is 
attached, and from which it is derived? We have 
a tendency to play our thoughts externally, and the 
consciousness we have of this play going on is sent 
back to the thought by a kind of ricochet. Thus 
arises the emotion, which usually has an idea as its 
centre, but in which there are especially visible the 
sensations in which that idea is prolonged. Sensations 
and idea are moreover so continuous here with each 
other that we can never say where the idea ends or 
where the sensations begin. And that is why con- 
sciousness, placing itself midway and contented with 
the mean, erects the feeling into a sui generis state in- 
termediate between the sensation and the idea. But I 
shall not press this. The problem that I have raised 
can hardly be solved in the present state of psycho- 
logical science. 

It remains, in conclusion, to show that this concep- 
tion of mental effort takes account of the principal 
effects of intellectual work, and that it is at the same 
time that which most nearly approaches pure and 
simple description of fact and has least resemblance 
to a theory. 

It is an acknowledged fact that effort gives to the 
idea greater clearness and distinction. Now, an idea 
is the clearer the greater the number of details that 



224 MIND-ENERGY 

stand out in it, and it is the more distinct the better 
it is isolated and differentiated from all the others. 
But if mental effort consist in a series of actions and 
reactions between a scheme and images, we should just 
expect this inward movement on the one hand to 
isolate the idea and on the other hand to increase its 
content. The idea is isolated from all the others, be- 
cause the organizing scheme rejects the images which 
are not capable of developing it and confers thus a real 
individuality on the present content of the conscious- 
ness. On the other hand, it fills itself with an increas- 
ing number of details, because the development of the 
scheme is brought about by the absorption of all the 
memories and all the images which the scheme can 
assimilate. Thus, in the relatively simple intellectual 
effort in which consists the attention given to a percep- 
tion, it seems indeed, as I said, that the pure perception 
begins by suggesting a hypothesis intended to interpret 
it, and that this scheme then draws to it manifold 
memories which it tries on the various parts of the 
perception itself. The perception, then, enriches itself 
with all the details evoked by the memory of images, 
whilst it remains distinguished from all other percep- 
tions by the one unchanged label, so to say, which the 
scheme has affixed to it from the very beginning. 

It has been said that attention is a state of " mono- 
ideism! " u and it has been noticed, on the other hand, 

"Ribot, Psychologie de V Attention, p. 6 (Paris, 1889). 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 225 

that the richness of a mental state is in proportion to 
the effort to which it bears witness. These two views 
are easily reconciled together. In all intellectual effort 
there is a multiplicity, visible or latent, of images which 
crowd and press to enter into a scheme. But, the 
scheme being relatively one and invariable, the mani- 
fold images which aspire to fill it are either analogous 
to one another or co-ordinated with one another. 
There is, then, mental effort only where there are 
intellectual elements on their way to organization. In 
this meaning, every mental effort is indeed a tendency 
to monoideism, but the unity towards which the mind 
moves is not in that case an abstract unity, dry and 
void; it is the unity of a " directive idea " common to 
a great number of organized elements. It is the very 
unity of life. 

From a misunderstanding of the nature of this unity 
have arisen the principal difficulties which surround 
the question of intellectual effort. There is no doubt 
that this effort " concentrates " the mind and makes it 
bear on a " single " idea. But it does not follow, be- 
cause an idea is single, that it is also simple. It may, 
on the contrary, be complex, and we have shown that 
there is always complexity when the mind makes 
effort: in that, indeed, is to be found the character- 
istic of intellectual effort. This is why I have thought 
it possible to explain the effort of the intellect without 
going out of the intellect, simply by a certain com- 



226 MIND-ENERGY 

position, or by a certain interference, of intellectual 
elements among themselves. But if we take unity 
to imply simplicity, if we suppose that intellectual ef- 
fort can bear on a simple idea and the idea remain 
simple, how are we to distinguish an idea when it 
is laboured from the same idea when it is easy? How 
will the state of intellectual tension differ from the 
state of intellectual relaxation? We shall have to 
look for the difference outside the idea itself. We 
shall have to make it reside either in the affective ac- 
companiment of the idea or in the intervention of a 
" force " external to intelligence. But, then, neither 
this affective accompaniment nor this indefinable sup- 
plement of force will explain how and why intellectual 
effort is efficacious. When the time comes to give an 
account of the efficacy, it will be necessary to leave out 
everything which is not idea, place oneself confronting 
the idea itself, and look for an internal difference be- 
tween the purely passive idea and the same idea ac- 
companied by effort. And then we must necessarily 
perceive that the idea is composite, and that its ele- 
ments have not in each case the same relation between 
them. But, if the internal contexture differs, why 
seek elsewhere than in this difference the characteristic 
of intellectual effort? Since we must always end by 
recognizing that difference, why not begin with it? 
And if the internal movement of the elements of the 
idea account both for what is laborious and for what 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 227 

is efficacious in intellectual effort, why not see in the 
movement the very essence of the effort? 

Will it be said that I am postulating the duality 
of scheme and image, and also an action of one of 
these elements on the other? 

But, in the first place, there is nothing mysterious 
nor even hypothetical about the scheme. There is 
nothing in it which need shock the susceptibilities of 
a professional psychologist, accustomed to resolve ideas 
into images, or at least to define any idea by its re- 
lation to images real or possible. It is indeed as a 
function of real or possible images that the mental 
scheme, such as it has appeared throughout this essay, 
should be defined. It consists in an expectation of 
images, in an intellectual attitude intended sometimes 
to prepare the advent of one definite image, as in the 
case of memory, sometimes to organize a more or 
less prolonged play among the images capable of in- 
serting themselves in it, as in the case of creative 
imagination. The scheme is tentatively what the 
image is decisively. It presents in terms of becoming, 
dynamically, what the images give us statically as 
already made. Present and acting in the work of 
calling up images, it draws back and disappears behind 
the images once evoked, its work being then accom- 
plished. The image, with its fixed outline, pictures 
what has been. A mind working only with images 
could but recommence its past or arrange the congealed 



228 MIND-ENERGY 

elements of the past, like pieces of mosaic, in another 
order. But for a flexible mind, capable of utilizing its 
past experience by bending it back along the lines of 
the present, there must, besides the image, be an idea 
of a different kind, always capable of being realized 
into images, but always distinct from them. The 
scheme is nothing else. 

The existence of this scheme is fact. It is the 
reduction of all ideation to clean-cut images, copied 
from external objects, which is hypothesis. Let me 
add that nowhere is the insufficiency of the hypothesis 
so clearly shown as in the subject with which we are 
dealing. If images constitute the whole of our mental 
life, how is the state of mental concentration differen- 
tiated from the state of intellectual dispersion? We 
must suppose that in certain cases they succeed one 
another without any common intention, and that in 
other cases, by some inexplicable chance, all the im- 
ages, simultaneous and successive, group themselves in 
a manner which offers an ever nearer approach to the 
solution of one and the same problem. Shall we be 
told that it is not chance, but the resemblance of the 
images, which makes them call up one another, me- 
chanically, according to a general law of association? 
But, in the case of intellectual effort, the images which 
follow one another may just have no real external like- 
ness among themselves. Their resemblance may be 
wholly internal; it is an identity of meaning, an equal 



INTELLECTUAL EFFORT 229 

capacity of solving a problem towards which they oc- 
cupy analogous or complementary positions, despite 
their differences of concrete form. The problem 
itself, therefore, must be standing before the mind, not 
at all as an image. Were it itself an image, it would 
evoke images resembling it and resembling one an- 
other. But since its task is, on the contrary, to call up 
and group images according to their power of solving 
the difficulty, it must consider this power of the images 
and not their external and apparent form. It is there- 
fore a mode of presentation distinct from the imaged 
presentation, although it can only be defined in rela- 
tion to mental imagery. 

It is futile to object that there is difficulty in con- 
ceiving the action of the scheme on the images. Is the 
action of an image on an image any clearer? When 
we are told that images attract each other by reason 
of their resemblance, are we carried beyond pure and 
simple description of fact? All I ask is that no part 
of experience shall be neglected. Besides the influence 
of image on image, there is the attraction or the im- 
pulsion exercised on the images by the scheme. Be- 
sides the development of the mind on one single plane, 
on the surface, there is the movement of the mind 
which goes from one plane to another, deeper down. 
Besides the mechanism of association, there is that of 
mental effort. The forces at work in the two cases do 
not simply differ in intensity, they differ in their direc- 



230 MIND-ENERGY 

tion. As to knowing how they work, this is a question 
which does not only concern psychology; it is part of 
the general and metaphysical problem of causality. 
Between impulsion and attraction, between the efficient 
cause and the final cause, there is, I hold, something 
intermediate, a form of activity from which philoso- 
phers have drawn, by way of impoverishment and dis- 
sociation, in passing to the two opposite and extreme 
limits, the idea of efficient cause on the one hand and 
of final cause on the other. This operation, which is 
the very operation of life, consists in the gradual pas- 
sage from the less realized to the more realized, from 
the intensive to the extensive, from a reciprocal im- 
plication of parts to their juxtaposition. Intellectual 
effort is something of this kind. In analysing it, I have 
pressed as far as I could, on the simplest and at the 
same time the most abstract example, the growing 
materialization of the immaterial which is character- 
istic of vital activity. 



VII 

BRAIN AND THOUGHT: 
A PHILOSOPHICAL ILLUSION 

A paper read at the International Congress of Philosophy at 
Geneva in 1904, and published in the "Revue de mC'ta- 
physique et de morale" under the title ff Le Paralogisme 
psycho-physiologique." 

The idea that there is an equivalence between a psychic 
state and its corresponding cerebral state is widely 
accepted in modern philosophy. Philosophers have 
discussed the causes and the significance of this equiv- 
alence rather than the equivalence itself. By some, 
it has been held that the cerebral state is reduplicated 
in certain cases by a psychical phosphorescence which 
illumines its outline. By others, it is supposed that 
the cerebral state and the psychic state form respec- 
tively two series of phenomena which correspond point 
to point, without it being necessary to attribute to the 
cerebral series the creation of the psychic. All, how- 
ever, agree in admitting an equivalence or, as it is more 
usual to say, a parallelism of the two series. In order 
to express the idea, I will formulate it as a thesis: 
" Given a cerebral state, there will ensue a definite 
psychic state." Or it may be stated thus : " A super- 

231 



232 MIND-ENERGY 

human intelligence, watching the dance of the atoms 
of which the human brain consists and possessing the 
psycho-physiological key, would be able to read, in 
the working of the brain, all that is occurring in the 
corresponding consciousness." Or, finally, it may be 
put in this way: " Consciousness tells no more than 
what is going on in the brain; it only tells it in a differ- 
ent language." 

There can be no doubt that the origin of this thesis 
is entirely metaphysical. It comes to us in a direct line 
from the Cartesian philosophy of the seventeenth cen- 
tury. Implicitly contained (with certain restrictions, 
it is true) in the philosophy of Descartes, accepted and 
pushed to extremes by his successors, it has passed from 
them, through the " medical philosophers " of the 
eighteenth century, to the psycho-physiology of today. 

It is easy to understand why the physiologists 
should have accepted it without demur. In the first 
place they had no choice, for the problem came to them 
from metaphysics, and the metaphysicians proposed 
no other solution. And, secondly, it was in the inter- 
est of physiology to rally to it, and to proceed as if it 
were some day to give us a complete translation of 
psychical activity into physiological language. Only 
on some such supposition could physiology advance, 
pushing ever farther its analysis of the cerebral condi- 
tions of thought. It was, and it still is, an excellent 
principle of research, signifying that we ought not to 



BRAIN AND THOUGHT 233' 

be too Hasty in assigning limits to physiology, any more 
indeed than to any other scientific investigation. But 
the dogmatic affirmation of psycho-physiological paral- 
lelism is another matter altogether. It is no longer 
a scientific rule, but a metaphysical hypothesis. In so 
far as it is intelligible, it is the metaphysics of science 
as science was conceived in the time of Descartes, that 
is, in a purely mathematical framework. I believe 
that the facts, examined without prejudice and without 
the bias towards a mathematical mechanism, suggest 
a more subtle hypothesis concerning the correspon- 
dence between the psychic and the cerebral state. The 
latter only expresses the action which is pre-figured in 
the former ; it marks out, so to say, the motor articula- 
tions of thought. Posit a psychical fact, and no doubt 
you therewith determine the concomitant cerebral state. 
But the converse is not true, for to the same cerebral 
state there may equally well correspond many different 
psychic facts. I have expounded this theory in Matter 
and Memory } and I will not repeat it here. The argu- 
ment I propose to bring forward now is independent 
of it altogether. I am not going to substitute another 
hypothesis for that of psycho-physiological parallelism; 
what I want to show is that this hypothesis itself im- 
plies, in its usual form, a fundamental self-contradic- 
tion. It is, moreover, a self-contradiction full of in- 
struction. In the perception that there is a self-con- 
tradiction we are given the clue to the direction in 



234 MIND-ENERGY 

which to seek the solution of the problem, at the same 
time that the mechanism of a most subtle metaphysical 
illusion is exposed. In pointing it out, we are not 
therefore engaged merely in critical and destructive 
work. 

My contention is that the thesis rests on an ambi- 
guity in the terms, that it cannot be stated in correct 
language without crumbling to pieces, that it implies 
a dialectical artifice, the surreptitious passing from 
one definite notation-system to an opposite notation- 
system without giving or taking notice of the substi- 
tution. Need I add that the fallacy is in one respect 
voluntary? It is suggested by the very terms in 
which the question is put; and it comes so naturally 
to our mind that we have no way of avoiding it except 
by forcing ourselves to formulate the thesis, by turns, 
in each of the two notation-systems of which philo- 
sophy makes use. 

When we speak of external objects, we have to 
choose, in fact, between two notation-systems. We 
can treat external objects, and the changes they ex- 
hibit, as a system of things or as a system of ideas. 
And either of these two systems will work, provided 
we keep strictly to the one we have chosen. 

Let us, first of all, try to distinguish the two sys- 
tems with precision. When realism speaks of things 
and idealism of ideas, it is not merely a dispute about 
words; realism and idealism are two different notation- 



BRAIN AND THOUGHT 235 

systems, that is to say, two different ways of setting 
about the analysis of reality. For the idealist, there is 
nothing in reality over and above what appears to 
his consciousness or to consciousness in general. It 
would be absurd to speak of a property of matter 
which could not be represented in idea. There is no 
virtuality, or, at least, nothing definitely virtual; what- 
ever exists is actual or could become so. Idealism is, 
then, a notation-system which implies that everything 
essential in matter is displayed or displayable in the 
idea which we have of it, and that the real world is 
articulated in the very same way as it is presented in 
idea. The hypothesis of realism is the exact reverse. 
When realism affirms that matter exists independently 
of the idea, the meaning is that beneath our idea of 
matter there is an inaccessible cause of that idea, that 
behind perception, which is actual, there are hidden 
powers and virtualities; in short, realism assumes that 
the divisions and articulations visible in our perception 
are purely relative to our manner of perceiving. 

I am not questioning that profounder definitions 
could be given of the two tendencies, realist and 
idealist, such as they are to be found throughout the 
history of philosophy. I have myself indeed used 
the words " realism " and " idealism " in a somewhat 
different meaning. This is as much as to say that I 
have no particular liking for the definitions I have 
just given. They may characterize an idealism like 



236 MIND-ENERGY 

that of Berkeley and the realism opposed to it. They 
may also fairly well represent our ordinary notion of 
the two tendencies — the tendency of idealism to 
include the whole reality in what can be presented 
to our mind, the tendency of realism to claim to pass 
beyond what is presented to our mind. But the argu- 
ment I am about to put forward is independent of 
any historical conception of realism and idealism. If 
any one is inclined to dispute the generality of my 
two definitions, I simply ask him to accept the words 
realism and idealism as conventional terms by which 
I intend to indicate, in the course of this study, two 
notations of reality, one of which implies the possi- 
bility, the other the impossibility, of identifying things 
with their ideas, that is with the presentations, spread 
out and articulated in space, which they offer to a 
human consciousness. That these two postulates are 
mutually exclusive, that consequently it is illegitimate 
to apply the two notation-systems at the same time 
to the same object, every one will agree. Now, I 
require nothing more for my present purpose. 

I propose to establish the three following points: 
(i) If we choose the idealist notation, the affirmation 
of parallelism (in the meaning of equivalence) between 
the psychic state and the cerebral state is a self-con- 
tradiction. (2) If, on the other hand, we choose the 
realist notation, there is the same contradiction, but 
transposed. (3) The thesis of parallelism appears 



BRAIN AND THOUGHT 237 

consistent only when we employ at the same time, in 
the same proposition, both notation-systems together. 
That is to say, the thesis is inteligible only because, 
by an unconscious trick of intellectual conjuring, we 
pass instantly from realism to idealism and from 
idealism to realism, showing ourselves in the one at 
the very moment when we are going to be caught 
in the act of self-contradiction in the other. The 
trick, moreover, is quite natural; we are, in this case, 
born conjurors, because the problem we are concerned 
with, the psycho-physiological problem of the relation 
of brain and thought, itself suggests by its very terms 
the two points of view of realism and idealism, — the 
term " brain " making us think of a thing, the term 
" thought " of an idea. By the very wording of the 
question is prepared the double meaning which vitiates 
the answer. 

First of all, then, we will place ourselves at the 
idealist standpoint, and consider, as an example, the 
perception of the objects which at any given moment 
occupy the visual field. These objects act on the visual 
centres in the brain through the retina and the optic 
nerve. There they bring about a modification of 
atomic and molecular dispositions. What is the rela- 
tion of this cerebral modification to the external ob- 
jects? 

The thesis of parallelism is that the cerebral state 



2 3 8 MIND-ENERGY 

caused by the objects, and not the objects themselves, 
determines conscious perception, and therefore, so 
long as the cerebral state exists, all the objects per- 
ceived might, by a touch as it were of a magic wand, 
cease to exist, it would in no way alter what is going 
on in consciousness. But it is obvious that on the 
idealist hypothesis such a proposition is absurd. Ex- 
ternal objects are for the idealist images, and the brain 
is one of them. There is nothing in things themselves 
over and above what is displayed or displayable in the 
images. There is nothing, then, in the dancing about 
of cerebral atoms over and above a dance of atoms. 
Since this is all we have supposed to be in the brain, it 
is all that will be found there or that can be got out of 
it. To say that an image of the surrounding world 
issues from this image of a dance of atoms, or that 
the image of the one expresses the image of the other, 
or that given the one the other is also given, is self- 
contradictory, since these two images — the external 
world and the intra-cerebral movement — have been 
assumed to be of like nature, and since the latter 
image is, by the very hypothesis, a tiny part of the field 
of images presented, while the external world is that 
field in its entirety. To say that the cerebral move- 
ments contain virtually the image presentation which 
is the external world may indeed seem intelligible if 
we hold the doctrine that movement is something un~ 



BRAIN AND THOUGHT 239 

derlying the idea of it, a mysterious power whose effect 
upon us is alone perceived. But this is evidently self- 
contradictory if we hold the doctrine that movement is 
itself idea, for it amounts to saying that a small patch 
of the field of presentation is the whole of presenta- 
tion. 

I can understand, assuming the idealist hypothesis, 
that cerebral modifications may be an effect of the 
action of external objects; they may be movements 
received by the organism which lead it to prepare the 
appropriate reactions. The nerve-centres, — images 
in the midst of images, moving pictures like all the 
other pictures, — contain movable parts which take 
in certain movements from outside and turn them 
into internal movements of reaction, either carried out 
or simply started. But, then, the work of the brain — 
a picture — is limited to receiving the influence of the 
other pictures and to marking out, as I said, their 
motor articulations. In this, and in this alone, is the 
brain indispensable to the remainder of our world- 
presentation, and that is why it cannot be injured 
without there resulting a partial or total destruction of 
that presentation. But it does not provide or exhibit 
the presentation, because, itself idea, it could not 
present the whole of the presentation unless it ceased 
to be a part of the presentation and became the whole. 
Formulated in strictly idealist language, the thesis of 



2 4 o MIND-ENERGY 

parallelism would therefore have to be summed up 
in the self-contradictory proposition: the part is the 
whole. 

But the truth is that the philosopher unconsciously 
passes from the idealist to a pseudo-realist point of 
view. He began by viewing the brain as an idea or 
picture exactly like all other ideas or pictures, encased 
in the other pictures and inseparable from them: the 
internal motion of the brain, being then a picture in 
the midst of pictures, was not required to provide 
the other pictures, since these were given with it and 
around it. But insensibly he comes to changing the 
brain and the intra-cerebral motion into things, that is 
to say, into causes hidden behind a particular picture 
and whose power extends far beyond what is pre- 
sented. Whence this sliding from idealism to realism? 
It is favoured by many subtle fallacies; yet it would 
not be so smooth and easy were there not facts that 
seem to point in the same direction. 

For, besides perception, there is memory. When 
I remember objects once perceived, the objects may 
be gone. One only has remained, my body; and yet 
the other objects may become visible again in the form 
of memory-images. Surely, then, it seems, my body, 
or some part of my body, has the power of evoking 
these images. Let us assume it does not create them; 
at least it is able to arouse them. How could it do 
this, were it not that to definite cerebral states cor- 



BRAIN AND THOUGHT 241 

respond definite memory-images, and were there not, 
in this precise meaning, a parallelism between cerebral 
work and thought? 

The reply is obvious : in the idealist hypothesis it is 
impossible for an object to be presented as an idea in 
the complete absence of the object itself. If there be 
nothing in the object over and above what is ideally 
present, if the presence of the object coincide with 
the idea we have of it, any part of the idea of the 
object must be in some sort a part of its presence. 
The recollection is no longer the object itself, I 
grant. Many things are wanted before it can be 
that. In the first place, it is fragmentary, for usually 
the recollection retains only some elements of the 
primitive perception. Again, it exists only for the 
person who evokes it, whereas the object forms part 
of a common experience. Lastly, when the memory- 
image arises, the accompanying modifications of the 
brain-image are no longer, as in perception, movements 
strong enough to excite the organism-image to react 
immediately. The body no longer feels uplifted by the 
perceived object, and since it is in the suggestion of 
activity that the feeling of actuality consists, the ob- 
ject presented no longer appears actual : this is what we 
express by saying that it is no longer present. The 
fact is that, in the idealist hypothesis, the memory- 
image can only be a pellicle detached from the primi- 
tive presentation or, what amounts to the same thing, 



242 MIND-ENERGY 

from the object. It is always present, but conscious- 
ness turns its attention away from it so long as there is 
no reason for consciousness to consider it. Conscious- 
ness has an interest in perceiving it only when it 
feels itself capable of making use of it, that is to say, 
when the present cerebral state already outlines some 
of the nascent motor reactions which the real object 
(that is, the complete idea) would have determined: 
this beginning of bodily activity confers on the idea 
a beginning of actuality. But, then, there is no such 
thing as " parellelism " or " equivalence " between the 
memory-image and the cerebral state. For the nas- 
cent motor reactions portray some of the possible ef- 
fects of the idea which is about to reappear, but they 
do not portray the idea ; and as the same motor reac- 
tion may follow many very different recollections, it is 
not a definite recollection which is evoked by a definite 
bodily state; on the contrary, many different recol- 
lections are equally possible, and among them con- 
sciousness exercises a choice. They are subject to 
only one common condition — that of entering the 
same motor frame : in this lies their " resemblance," 
a term which is vague in current association theories, 
but which acquires a precise meaning when we define 
it by the identity of motor articulations. However, 
I shall not press this. I am content to say that in 
the idealist hypothesis the perceived objects are coinci- 
dent with the complete and completely acting presen- 



BRAIN AND THOUGHT 243 

tation, the remembered objects with the same, but in- 
complete and incompletely acting, presentation, and 
that neither in the case of perception nor in the case of 
memory is the cerebral state equivalent to the presenta- 
tion, for the simple reason that it is part of it. Let 
us turn, then, to realism and see whether it will make 
the thesis of psycho-physiological parallelism clearer. 

Again, objects fill my visual field; my brain is in 
the midst of them; in my sensory nerve-centres are 
displacements of molecules and atoms occasioned by 
the action of external objects. From the idealist 
standpoint, I had no right to attribute to these internal 
movements a mysterious power of duplicating them- 
selves with the idea of external things, for they were 
supposed to be in reality what they are in idea, and 
since, by the hypothesis, they present themselves as 
movements of certain atoms of the brain, they are 
movements of atoms of the brain and nothing else. 
But it is the essence of realism to suppose that behind 
ideas is a cause which is not idea. There seems no 
reason, then, why realism should not hold that the 
idea of external objects is implied in the cerebral modi- 
fications. According to some theories, the cerebral 
states are actually the creators of the ideas, which 
are then only their " epiphenomenon." According 
to other theories it is supposed, following the Car- 
tesian distinction, that the cerebral movements are the 



244 MIND-ENERGY 

occasion, not the cause, of the apparition of conscious 
perceptions, or even that the perceptions and the move- 
ments are only two aspects of a reality which is neither 
movement nor perception. All, however, believe that 
to a definite cerebral state there corresponds a definite 
conscious state, and that the internal movements of the 
cerebral substance, considered by themselves, would 
reveal to one who should possess the cipher the com- 
plete detail of whatever might be going on in the cor- 
responding consciousness. 

But is it not at once clear that to consider the brain 
separately, and separately also the movement of its 
atoms, involves now an actual self-contradiction? An 
idealist has the right to declare any object isolable 
which gives him an isolated idea, because for him the 
object is not distinct from the idea. But realism 
consists precisely in the rejection of this view; it holds 
that the lines of separation which we draw in the 
field of presentation are artificial or relative; it sup- 
poses that beneath presentations there is a system of 
reciprocal actions and entangled potentialities; in 
short, it defines the object not by its entry into our 
presentation, but by its solidarity with the whole of 
a reality supposed to be unknowable. The more 
science investigates the nature of the body in the direc- 
tion of its " reality," the more it sees each property 
of the body, consequently its very existence, melt into 
the relations in which it stands with the matter outside 



BRAIN AND THOUGHT 245 

it capable of influencing it. Indeed, the terms which 
reciprocally influence one another (whatever the names 
we give them: atoms, material points, centres of force, 
etc.) are only, for science, provisional terms; it is the 
reciprocal influence, or interaction, which is for it the 
final reality. < 

Now, — should I say to the realist, — you began by 
giving yourself a brain, and saying that objects ex- 
ternal to it modify it in such a way as to raise up ideas 
of themselves. Then you did away with these objects 
external to the brain, and ascribed to the cerebral modi- 
fication the power of providing by its own resources 
the idea of the objects. But, in withdrawing the ob- 
jects which encase it, you are withdrawing also, whether 
you will or no, the cerebral state, for it owes to them 
all its properties and its reality. You only preserve 
this cerebral state because you pass surreptitiously to 
the idealist notation-system, where you can posit as 
isolable by right what is isolated in idea. 

Keep to your hypothesis. External objects and the 
brain being compresent, the idea is produced. You 
ought to say that this idea is a function not of the 
cerebral state alone, but of cerebral state and the ob- 
jects determining it, cerebral state and external objects 
now forming together one indivisible block. Here 
again, then, the thesis of parallelism that the cerebral 
states, detached from the external objects, are them- 
selves alone able to create, occasion or at least express 



246 MIND-ENERGY 

the ideas of the objects, cannot be stated without falling 
to pieces. In strictly realist language it would be 
formulated thus: A part, which owes all that it is to 
the remainder of the whole, can be conceived as sub' 
sisting when the remainder of the whole has vanished. 
Or, still more simply: A relation between two terms 
is the equivalent of one of them. 

Either the movements of atoms going on in the 
brain are just what they purport to be in our idea 
of them, or they are different. In the first hypo- 
thesis, they are perceived as they are, and whatever 
else we perceive is then another thing: between the 
cerebral movements and the rest of what we per- 
ceive there is, consequently, the relation of contained 
to container. This is the idealist standpoint. In 
the second hypothesis, the fundamental reality of the 
cerebral movements consists in their solidarity with 
all that is behind the totality of our other perceptions, 
and by the very fact of considering this fundamental 
reality we consider the whole of the reality with which 
the cerebral movements form an undivided system: 
which amounts to saying that the intra-cerebral move- 
ment, envisaged as an isolated phenomenon, has van- 
ished, and that there can be no longer any pretence of 
making into the substratum of presentation, as a whole, 
a phenomenon which is only a part, and a part arti- 
ficially carved out of the middle of it. 

But the fact is that realism never does maintain 



BRAIN AND THOUGHT 247 

itself in a pure unalloyed state. We can posit the 
existence of the real in general behind the ideas; but 
as soon as we begin to speak of particular reals, we 
must, whether we will or no, assume that things more 
or less coincide with the ideas we have of them. In 
front of the hidden background which he assumes to 
be reality itself, and where everything must be implied 
in everything, since it is behind space, the realist sets 
side by side, just as the idealist does, the distinct and 
explicit ideas or pictures which make up the whole 
of presentation. Realist when he posits the real, he 
becomes idealist directly he affirms anything con- 
cerning it, because realist-notation, when applied to 
explanations of detail, can hardly consist in anything 
else but inscribing, beneath each term of idealist- 
notation, a mark which indicates its provisional char- 
acter. Be it so: but then, what we have just said of 
idealism now applies to realism which has taken up 
idealism on its own account. And therefore, by what- 
ever name we denote the system, to say that cerebral 
states are the equivalent of perceptions and memories 
comes always to affirming that the part is the whole. 

Comparing the two systems, we see that it is essen- 
tial to idealism to stop at what is displayed and spread 
out in space and at spatial divisions, whilst realism 
regards the display as superficial and the divisions as 
artificial: realism assumes behind the juxtaposed 
ideas a system of reciprocal actions, consequently a 



248 MIND-ENERGY 

mutual implication of the pictures or ideas. Now, as 
our knowledge of matter can never get clean away 
from space, and as the reciprocal implication with 
which realism deals, however deep it be, can never be- 
come extraneous to space without becoming extraneous 
to science, realism in its explanations can never get 
beyond idealism. We are always more or less in 
idealism (in the sense defined) when we have to do 
with knowledge or science: were we not, we should 
not even think of taking isolated parts of reality and 
relating them to each other, — which is the very es- 
sence of science. The hypothesis of the realist is 
therefore here only an ideal, whose purpose is to re- 
mind him that he has never gone deep enough down in 
his explanation of reality, and that he must discover 
more and more fundamental relations between the 
parts of the real which to our eyes are juxtaposed in 
space. But the realist cannot help hypostasizing this 
ideal. He hypostasizes it in the ideas or pictures, set 
side by side, which for the idealist are reality itself. 
These ideas become therefore for the realist so many 
things — that is to say, reservoirs of hidden potentiali- 
ties — and he can now think of the intra-cerebral 
movement (no longer simple ideas, but things) as en- 
closing potentially the whole complete world as idea. 
In this consists his affirmation of psycho-physiological 
parallelism. He forgets that he had placed his reser- 
voir outside the world of idea and not within it, out of 



BRAIN AND THOUGHT 249 

space and not within it, and that in any case his original 
hypothesis consisted in supposing reality either undi- 
vided or articulated in itself otherwise than it is in 
idea. In making a particular part of the world as 
reality correspond to each part of the world as idea, 
he articulates the real as he articulates the idea, he 
displays reality in space, and abandons his realism in 
order to enter into idealism, in which the relation of 
the brain as idea to the rest of the world as idea is 
clearly that of the part to the whole. 

You began by speaking — should I say again to the 
philosopher — of the brain such as we see it, such 
as it stands out in the midst of the presentation: so 
you assumed it to be a part of presentation, an idea, 
and you were in idealism. There, I repeat, the rela- 
tion of the brain to the rest of presentation can only be 
the relation of part to whole. Thence, all of a sud- 
den, you have fled to a reality supposed to lie beneath 
the presentation. Very good: but such reality is sub- 
spatial, which amounts to saying that the brain is no 
more an independent entity. What you have to do 
with now is the totality of the real, in itself unknowa- 
ble, over which is spread the totality of the presenta- 
tion. You are now, indeed, in realism; and no more 
in this realism than in the idealism of a moment ago 
are the cerebral stateg the equivalent of the whole of 
presentation : it is — I must repeat it — the whole 
world of things which is again implied (but, this time, 



250 MIND-ENERGY 

concealed and unknowable) in the whole of perception. 
But lo ! taking the brain apart and dealing with things 
separately, you are actually continuing to decompose 
and recompose reality along the same lines and accord- 
ing to the same laws as presentation, which means 
that you no longer distinguish the one from the other. 
Back you are, then, in idealism; there you ought to 
remain. But not at all! You do indeed preserve 
the brain as it is given in presentation, therefore as an 
idea, but you forget that if the real is thus spread 
out in the presentation, if it is extension and not ten- 
sion, it can no longer compress within itself the powers 
and virtualities postulated by realism ; unheedingly you 
erect the cerebral movements into the equivalent of 
the whole of presentation. You are therefore oscillat- 
ing from idealism to realism and from realism to ideal- 
ism, but so quickly that you do not perceive the see-saw 
motion and you think yourself all the time astride the 
two systems joined into one. This apparent recon- 
ciliation of two irreconcilable affirmations is the very 
essence of the thesis of parallelism. 

I have tried to dissipate the illusion. It is not likely 
that I have entirely succeeded, because so many sym- 
pathetic ideas are grouped around the thesis of paral- 
lelism and protect it. Some of these ideas were born 
of the thesis itself; others, on the contrary, preceded it 
and were the instigators of the illegitimate union 
which gave it birth; others again, with no blood rela- 



BRAIN AND THOUGHT 251 

tionship, have modelled themselves on it by constantly 
living beside it. All form round it today an imposing 
line of defence, which, when broken through on one 
point, calls up renewed resistance on another. I may 
specify some of these in particular. 

1. There is the implicit (I might even say the un- 
conscious) hypothesis of a cerebral soul, I mean the 
hypothesis that the world as idea is concentrated in the 
cortical substance. As our presentation-world seems 
to accompany us when our body moves, we reason 
that there must be, inside that body, the equivalent 
of the world-presentation. The cerebral movements 
are thought to be this equivalent. Consciousness, 
then, can perceive the whole of the universe without 
putting itself out of the way; it has only to range 
within the limited space of the cerebral cortex, — a 
camera obscura where a miniature reproduction is to 
be found of the whole world. 

2. There is the idea that all causality is mechanical 
and that there is nothing in the universe which is not 
mathematically calculable. Then, as our actions re- 
sult from our ideas (past as well as present), we must, 
under pain of admitting a breach in mechanical causal- 
ity, suppose that the brain, from which the action is 
started, contains the equivalent of perception, memory 
and even thought itself. But the idea that the whole 
world, including the living beings in it, can be treated 
as the subject of pure mathematics, is an a priori view 



252 MIND-ENERGY 

of mind which goes back to the Cartesians. We may 
express it in modern terms, we may translate it into the 
language of present science, we may call in support of 
it an ever-increasing number of actual observations 
(the idea itself has prompted us to make them) and so 
attribute to it an experimental origin, the effectively 
measurable part of reality remains limited none the 
less, and the law, regarded as absolute, retains the 
character of a metaphysical hypothesis, which it already 
had in the time of Descartes. 

3. There is the idea that all that is required, in 
order to pass from the idealist standpoint of image- 
presentation to the realist standpoint of thing in itself, 
is to substitute for the pictorial presented image that 
same image reduced to a colourless design and to the 
mathematical relations of its parts to one another. 
Hypnotized, so to speak, by the void which our mental 
power of abstraction is creating, we accept the sug- 
gestion that some, I know not what, marvellous sig- 
nificance is inherent in the mere motion of material 
points in space, that is to say, in an impoverished 
perception. We endow this blank abstraction with a 
virtue we should never have thought of bestowing on 
the concrete image, far richer, given in our immediate 
perception. But the truth is that we have to choose 
between the conception of reality, which represents 
it spread out in space and consequently in idea, thus 
considering it as altogether actual or ready to become 



BRAIN AND THOUGHT 253 

so, and the conception of reality which represents it 
as a reservoir of potentialities shrunk into itself, so to 
say, and outside space. No work of abstracting, of 
eliminating, — in short, of impoverishing, — per- 
formed on the first conception brings us any nearer to 
the second. Whatever you say concerning the relation 
of the brain to the idea from the standpoint of a pic- 
torial idealism, which takes immediate presentations 
as they are, coloured and living, appplies a fortiori to 
an abstruse idealism which reduces them to their 
mathematical skeleton, and which, by emphasizing the 
spatial character and reciprocal externality of the 
ideas, only shows more clearly how impossible it is for 
one of them to include all the others. Because, by 
rubbing extensive presentations against one another, 
you have blotted out the qualities which differentiated 
them in perception, you have not thereby advanced 
one step towards a reality which you assumed to be 
tension, not extension, and consequently so much the 
more real as it is more inextensive. As well might 
we imagine that a worn-out coin, by losing the precise 
mark which denotes its value, had gained an unlimited 
purchasing power. 

4. Lastly, there is the idea that if two wholes are 
solidary, each part of the one is solidary with a definite 
part of the other. And so, as there is no state of 
consciousness without its cerebral accompaniment, as a 
variation of this cerebral state does not take place 



254 MIND-ENERGY 

without bringing on a variation of the conscious state 
(although the converse is not necessarily true in all 
cases), as an injury which interferes with cerebral 
activity may entail an injury to conscious activity, we 
conclude that to any fraction whatsoever of the state 
of consciousness there corresponds a definite part of 
the cerebral state, and then that one of the two terms 
can be substituted for the other. As though we had 
the right to extend to the detail of the parts, thus 
supposing them to be related each to each, what has 
only been observed or inferred of the two wholes, and 
so convert a relation of solidarity into a relation of 
equivalent to equivalent! The presence or absence 
of a screw may decide whether or not a machine will 
work: does it follow that each part of the screw cor- 
responds to a particular part of the machine, and that 
the equivalent of the machine is the screw? The rela- 
tion of the cerebral state to the idea or presentation 
may very well be that of the screw to the machine, that 
is, of the part to the whole. 

These four ideas themselves imply a great number 
of others, which it would be interesting to analyse in 
their turn, because they would be found to be, in a kind 
of way, so many harmonics the fundamental tone of 
which is the thesis of parallelism. In this study I have 
only tried to bring to light the contradiction inherent 
in the thesis itself. Just because the consequences to 
which it leads, and the postulates which it contains, 



BRAIN AND THOUGHT 255 

cover, so to say, the whole domain of philosophy, it 
has seemed to me that this critical examination is in- 
cumbent on, and may serve as the starting-point of, a 
theory of the mind considered in its relation to the de- 
terminism of nature. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Abnormality, defect or excess, 

151 

Albes, 149 
Anjel, 139, 142 
Apraxia, 204 
Arnaud, 136, 137, 143 
Artigues, 112 
Attention, sensory, 190 
Attention to life, 59, 60, 147, 
153, 178 

Bagley, 206 

Bastian, 217 

Belugou, 140 

Berkeley's idealism, 235-236 

Bernard-Leroy, 135, 146, 
171 

Binet, Alfred, on chess-play- 
ing, 197 

Bonatelli, 139 

Bonnet, Charles, 50 

Bourdon, 140 

Bourget, Paul, 181 

Brain, its functions, 10; an 
organ of choice, 13-14; an 
organ of attention to life, 
59 

Cabanis, 50 

Cartesian metaphysics, 50 
Cattell, 206 

Cerebral duality, hypothesis 
of, 142-143, 241 



Cerebral soul, idea of, 251 

Certainty as limit of proba- 
bilities, 5-7 

Chess-players' memory, 197 

Claparede, theory of " disin- 
terest," 126 

Comte, Auguste, 36 

Consciousness, coextensive 

with life, 1 7 ; primary func- 
tions, 8; relation to brain, 
1 1 ; signifies memory, 8, 68 

Contemporaneous formation 
of perception and memory, 

157 
Coriat, 137 

Creative imagination, 213 
Crossing of matter by con- 
sciousness, 23 



Darwin, 23 

Delage, 131 

Depersonalization, 134-135 

Descartes, 49, 232, 233 

Dewey on psychology of tl- 
fort, 2,15 

Disinterestedness in life, 95, 
116 

Disinterestedness of the 
dream, 124-126 

Dream-stuff, 105 

Dream a counterfeit of insan- 
ity, 155 



259 



i6o 



INDEX 



Dream caused by barking dog, Inhibitory mechanisms, 153 



analysis of, 124 
Dream of deep slumber, 132 
Dromard, 149 
Dugas, 135 
Dynamic scheme, 196 

Enfeebled impulse, 183 

Epiphenomenon, 243 

Equivalence of cerebral and 
mental, 45, 48, 233 

Fallacy of substituting the ab- 
stract for the concrete, 83 

Forel, 137 

Fouillee, 143 

Freud's Trawmdeutung, 13 1 

Future life, 35 

Galileo, 49, 98 
Goldscheider and Miiller's 

experiments, 119, 206 
Gradual recall, mechanism of, 

193 
Grasset, 1*40, 142 

Helvetius, 50 

Hervey, Marquis of, 105, 

115 
Heymans, 148, 149, 181 
Hoffding, 140 
Huxley, 1 

Idealism as a notation-system, 

234 
Illusion that memory is later 

than perception, 157-158 
Images and ideas as halts in 

thinking, 55 
Inattention to life, 184 



Instability of the dream* 128 
Instantaneous recall, mechan- 
ism of, 189 
Instinct and intelligence, 25 
Invention, the effort of, 211 

James, William, 78; 141, 195 
Janet, Dr. Pierre, 137, 148 
Jensen, 137, 138, 139, 143, 

172 
Joy the sign of creation, 29 
Juridical method in Psychical 

Research, 80 

Kepler, 49, 98 
Kinaesthetic images, 219 
Krapelin, 136, 137, 139, 141 

Ladd, Prof, G. T., 105 
Lalande, Prof. A., 144, 171 
Lamarck, 23 
La Mettrie, 50 
Lapie, 140 
Leibniz, 8, 50, 95 
Le Lorrain, 140 
Leon-Kindberg, 148 
Lewes, G. H., 209 
Light-sensation in dreams, 

106 
Lines of facts, 7 
Lodge, Sir O., 34 

Marie, Dr. Pierre, 90 
Materialist hypothesis, 40-43 
Matter, as necessity, 17; as 

necessary to the realization 

of life, 28 



INDEX 



261 



Maury, Alfred, 105, 108, 

128 
Mechanical causality, 251 
Mechanism of living action, 

18, 44 
Memory, its relation to the 
brain, 62 ff. ; how formed, 
158, 163; in dream, 116; 
a mirror-image of percep- 
tion, 165, 166 
Memory of the present, why 
concealed from conscious- 
ness, 175 
Mnemonics, 194 
Monoideism, 224 
Myers, F. W. H., 144 
Nature, from the standpoint 
of art, 30; from the moral 
standpoint, 31 

Newton, 98 

Oscillation of attention, 209, 
220 

Pantomime, brain as organ of, 

53, 94, 95 
Parallelism, hypothesis of, 91, 

237; metaphysical origin 

of, 48-50 
Pascal, 72 
Paulhan, 212 
Perception in the waking 

state and in the dream 

state, 118 fT. 
Pick, 136, 137 
Pieron, 143 
Pillsbury, 206 
Plato, 47 



Plotinus, 117 

Precipitation of dream-im- 
ages, 130 

Prejudice against psychical 
science, 76 

Prendergast, 192, 200 

Preperception, 209 

Present as mathematical in- 
stant, 8 

Problems, the great, 3-4 

Progressive aphasis, 66 

Psychasthenia, 138 

Rapidity of dreams, 129 

Reading experiments, 119, 
206 

Realism as a notation-system, 
235, 243 

Realist and idealist stand- 
points compared, 247 

Ribot, 141, 144, 187, 211 

Robert, W., 131 

Robert Houdin, 190-193 

Rolandic zone, 54 

Sander, 139, 140 
Scheme and image, 201 
Schemer, 112 
Schopenhauer, 112 
Sensory attention, 187 
Simon, Max, 108, 111 
Sleep, psychological condition 

of, 122 
Social life the goal of evolu- 
tion, 33 
Solidarity does not imply 

equivalence, 253 
Spinoza, 50 
Stevenson, R. L., 114 







i 


2«2 INDEX 




Survival, 72, 96-97 


Unforeseeablene9$, 17 




Systems of , philosophy, 1-2 


Veil on the past, 71 




Taine's theory of chess-play- 


Visual sensations condense a 




er's memory, 197 


history, 20 




Tartini's Devil's Sonata, 113 






Telepathy, 79-80 


Wigan, 143 




Tensions of duration, 20 


Witasek, 188 




Tension and tone, 147 


Word-memory, 62, 63, 89, 




Tissie, 107 


90 








V * * * ° * *1fr 



V <^ 











c° v ^ 



V v * Y * ° / -fe, V * ^ * ° /■ -%, 



>%># /^V'V.'-\^ - 



ex * 



\/y^\ / // ^ 



/- 













£ <& 









^ 






W,% 



s ^ 






^p< 




^^ ^# 



% 




* *F ^ '* 1 









# 












\* 



-:% 









< 



$ 

A& 









% 






^ 






d? 



- <# 






w \.^ 



r -\/ ^ 



•% \> %, 






^" ^ " 









Vo< ^d* %.<* 






.^ °- 









<% ", 



^ r ^ 



t .• «* 









& 



% 



«fc 






<& v> 



% 






\* 






^ c 



-<■■ 






3 a 









,p ^ 




^ 



c y 



c^ 



V> ^ v * , ^ 



-,v . \& \^ \\* 



G V ^^ *"/ "<P. ' rO" 






< 



<-' ' 









G^ 



o5 ^. 






^ ^ 












^ 



-* V 



F ^ 



* ,^ 






